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.Dd December 11, 2019
.Dt SOME-LIBS 7
.Os "Causal Agency"
.
.Sh NAME
.Nm Some Libraries
.Nd good ones
.
.Sh DESCRIPTION
This is a little list of C libraries
I've had good experiences using.
.
.Bl -tag -width Ds
.It Fl lcurl
The library behind the
.Xr curl 1
command.
It downloads or uploads things on the internet
through a number of protocols,
not just HTTP.
It has an easy-to-use library API,
appropriately named
.Xr libcurl-easy 3 .
I've used it to implement a
.Lk https://causal.agency/bin/title.html "page title fetcher" .
.
.It Fl lcurses
Okay so this one really isn't great.
Its interfaces can seem archaic
and its documentation is often poor.
However, it gets the job done
and is commonly available pretty much everywhere.
Interesting to note that
.Nx
uses its own implementation of curses
that is not GNU ncurses,
unlike
.Fx .
.
.It Fl ledit
This is a BSD line editing library,
similar to GNU readline.
It supports right-aligned prompts,
which I prefer for variable-length
information in shells.
.
.It Fl lkcgi
A CGI and FastCGI library
for web applications in C.
Don't worry,
it isolates HTTP parsing and input validation
from application logic
in sandboxed processes.
I think it's an excellent example
of how to design an API for C.
I used it to implement the
.Lk https://ascii.town/explore.html "torus web viewer" .
.
.It Fl lsqlite3
An embedded relational database engine.
It's amazing what you can do with this,
and it's super easy to use!
My one gripe with it is that the library and SQL documentation
are not available as
.Xr man 1
pages.
I'm currently working on a project using SQLite,
but it hasn't gotten very far yet.
.
.It Fl ltls
This is a new library in LibreSSL
which provides a much simpler interface for TLS sockets
compared to
.Fl lssl .
It's much more like what you'd expect
from other TLS socket wrappers,
with calls like
.Xr tls_connect 3 ,
.Xr tls_read 3
and
.Xr tls_write 3 .
I've used this for IRC clients, bouncers and bots.
.
.It Fl lz
An implementation of the DEFLATE compression algorithm
and gzip format.
It's all documented in comments in
.In zlib.h ,
which isn't bad,
but for my own use I copied the docs into
.Lk https://code.causal.agency/june/zlib-man-pages "manual pages" .
I've used this for decoding and encoding PNG images.
.El
.
.Sh AUTHORS
.An June Bug Aq Mt june@causal.agency
d>Use MakefileJune McEnroe