liberty/README.adoc

liberty
=======

'liberty' is a pseudolibrary largely consisting of reusable C code for my
various projects.  I used to copy-paste large swaths of it with minimal changes,
and it slowly became awfully painful to synchronize.  The project can be thought
of as a successor to my other C library, libxtnd.

You are supposed to import it as a git submodule and include the main source
file directly everywhere you need it, setting feature flags as appropriate.
Everything is declared "static".  I have come to the conclusion that this style
of C programming suits me the best, as it allows me to nearly forget about the
mess that are header files.

The API is intentionally unstable, which allows for easy refactoring.

All development is done on Linux, but other POSIX-compatible operating systems
should be generally supported as well.  They have an extremely low priority,
however, and I'm not testing them at all, perhaps with the exception of macOS.

Tools
-----
This project also hosts a number of supporting scripts written in portable AWK:

asciiman.awk::
	A fallback manual page generator for AsciiDoc documents,
	motivated by the hugeness of AsciiDoc's and Asciidoctor's dependency trees.
	Just like them, it uses the _man_ macro package.

cmake-parser.awk::
	Parses the CMake language to the extent that is necessary to reliably
	extract project versions.  Its greatest limitation is its inability
	to expand variables, which would require a full interpreter.

cmake-dump.awk::
	This can be used in conjunction with the previous script to dump CMake
	scripts in a normalized format for further processing.

lxdrgen.awk::
	Protocol code generator for a variant of XDR,
	which is link:libertyxdr.adoc[documented separately].
	Successfully employed in https://git.janouch.name/p/xK[xK].

lxdrgen-c.awk::
	LibertyXDR backend that builds on top of the C pseudolibrary.

lxdrgen-cpp.awk::
lxdrgen-cpp-win32.cpp::
lxdrgen-cpp-posix.cpp::
	LibertyXDR backend for C++, primarily targeting Win32 and its wide strings.
	Link the result together with one of the accompanied source files.

lxdrgen-go.awk::
	LibertyXDR backend for Go, supporting _encoding/json_ interfaces.  It also
	produces optimized JSON marshallers (however, note that the _json.Marshaler_
	interface is bound to be underperforming, due to the amount of otherwise
	avoidable memory allocations it necessitates).

lxdrgen-mjs.awk::
	LibertyXDR backend for Javascript, currently for decoding only.
	It cuts a corner by not using BigInts, on par with `JSON.parse()`.

lxdrgen-swift.awk::
	LibertyXDR backend for the Swift programming language.

Contributing and Support
------------------------
Use https://git.janouch.name/p/liberty to report any bugs, request features,
or submit pull requests.  `git send-email` is tolerated.  If you want to discuss
the project, feel free to join me at ircs://irc.janouch.name, channel #dev.

Bitcoin donations are accepted at: 12r5uEWEgcHC46xd64tt3hHt9EUvYYDHe9

License
-------
This software is released under the terms of the 0BSD license, the text of which
is included within the package along with the list of authors.