Building and Installing Glibc
William von Hagen · Apress eBooks · 2006
The GNU C library, popularly known as Glibc, is the unseen force that makes GCC, most C language applications compiled with GCC on Linux systems, and all GNU/Linux systems work. Any code library provides a set of functions that simplify writing certain types of applications. In the case of the GNU C library, the applications facilitated by Glibc are any C programming language applications. The functions provided by Glibc range from functions as fundamental to C as printf() to Portable Operating System Interface for Computer Environments (POSIX) functions for opening low-level network connections (more about the latter later). The C programming language actually has a relatively small number of keywords; most of what people think of as C is actually standard C library functions that are implemented in Glibc. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.