mcl

A hackable macro-generated container library for C.

This library was spawned by a scenario that I'm sure all readers can sympathise with:

An ambitious young(-ish) software engineer is inspired to tackle Advent of Code 2022 in pure C, only to find that their enthusiasm is gradually eroded by the need to reinvent various containers (list, stack, binary tree) for different types.

Where are the templates? Where is the STL? What am I doing with my life?

The engineer gets to roughly Day 20 before calling it a day, though not before deciding that next year they will attempt the same feat, but will be more prepared...

The mcl is a (WIP) attempt to aid the aforementioned software engineer by creating a library that roughly mirrors C++'s STL. C does not have a means of generating code for different types at compile time (AKA C++ templates) so to achieve this the preprocessor is used instead (I did briefly explore using void pointers everywhere, but it quickly got complicated, and I spent too much time worrying about lifetimes).

To use this library the basic pattern is to make a single macro call specifying the type you're interested in, which then generates a full set of functions for interacting with that type.

For example, the macro call MCL_BT(int) would generate the structure for a binary tree struct mcl_bt_int and the functions for interacting with this struct: mcl_bt_insert_int, mcl_bt_delete_int, mcl_bt_contains_int etc.

Currently supported types:

• MCL_DA for dynamically sized arrays (C++ vector)
• MCL_BT for binary trees (C++ set)

Planned stuff:

• MCL_LL for linked lists (C++ list)
• MCL_PQ for priority queues (C++ priority_queue)