Newlib is a
C standard library
The C standard library or libc is the standard library for the C programming language, as specified in the ISO C standard.ISO/IEC (2018). '' ISO/IEC 9899:2018(E): Programming Languages - C ยง7'' Starting from the original ANSI C standard, it wa ...
implementation intended for use on
embedded systems. It is a conglomeration of several library parts, all under
free software licenses that make them easily usable on embedded products.
It was created by
Cygnus Support as part of building the first GNU cross-development toolchains. It is now maintained by
Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.
Red Hat has become ass ...
developers
Jeff Johnston and
Corinna Vinschen, and is used in most commercial and non-commercial
GCC ports for non-Linux embedded systems.
System Calls
The section System Calls of the Newlib documentation describes how it can be used with many
operating systems. Its primary use is on embedded systems that lack any kind of operating system; in that case it calls a
board support package that can do things like write a byte of output on a serial port, or read a sector from a disk or other memory device.
Inclusion
Newlib is included in commercial GCC distributions by Atollic,
CodeSourcery, Code Red, KPIT,
Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.
Red Hat has become ass ...
and others, and receives support from major embedded-processor architecture vendors such as
ARM and
Renesas. It is used as the standard C library in
Cygwin
Cygwin ( ) is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled with minimal modification and executed.
The Cygwin in ...
, as well as being one standard C library among several for
AmigaOS 4.
, devkitARM and devkitPPC, toolchains targeted at
homebrew
Homebrewing mainly refers to small-scale, non-commercial manufacture of a drink, typically beer.
Homebrew or home brew may also refer to:
Computing
* Homebrew Computer Club
* Homebrew (package manager), for macOS and Linux
* Homebrew (video game ...
development for commercial game systems, include Newlib as their C library. The Open-R SDK for
Sony AIBO is also based on Newlib on top of the non-Unix Aperios.
,
Google Native Client SDK (NaCl) includes Newlib as the default C library over
glibc.
In 2019,
Keith Packard released ''Picolibc'',
Picolibc: C Libraries for Smaller Embedded Systems
/ref> a library offering standard C library APIs that targets small embedded systems with limited RAM, based on blending code from Newlib and AVR Libc.
See also
;Other C standard libraries
* Bionic libc
* dietlibc
* EGLIBC
The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project's implementation of the C standard library. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++ (and, indirectly, other programming languages). It was started in the 1980s by ...
* glibc
* klibc
* musl
* uClibc
* BSD libc
* picolibc
References
Further reading
*
External links
Newlib mailing list
*
{{CProLang
C standard library
Free computer libraries
Free software programmed in C
Interfaces of the Linux kernel
Linux APIs
AmigaOS 4 software