Reinvention of the C wheel, automatized

The project AutoC ships a collection of Ruby classes related to automagic C source code generation.

Specifically, it provides a means of generating strongly-typed general purpose C data containers (vectors, lists, maps etc.) similar to those provided by the C++'s STL template containers but implemented in pure ANSI C language.

Unlike similar attempts to introduce type-generic data containers to the C language which are typically the macro libraries, the AutoC is an explicit source code generator with 100% of provided functionality is implemented as (inline or extern) C functions making the code explicit, browseable and debuggable.

Qickstart

Install the autoc Ruby package from RubyGems

gem install autoc

Extract sample documentation

Generate a documentation header auto.h with reference of what can be provided by the AutoC

ruby -r autoc/scaffold -e docs

Extract the documentation with Doxygen

doxygen .

Explore the rendered HTML documentation starting at html/index.html

Build & run sample project

Create auto code descriptor in Ruby sample.rb

require 'autoc/module'
require 'autoc/hash_set'
AutoC::Module.render(:sample) do |m|
  m << AutoC::HashSet.new(:IntSet, :int)
end

Generate C code into sample_auto.[ch]

ruby sample.rb

Create sample C code sample.c

#include <stdio.h>
#include "sample_auto.h"
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
  IntSet set;
  IntSetCreate(&set);
  IntSetPut(&set, 1);
  IntSetPut(&set, 0);
  IntSetPut(&set, 1);
  IntSetPut(&set, -1);
  printf("size = %d\\n", IntSetSize(&set));
  for(IntSetRange r = IntSetRangeNew(&set); !IntSetRangeEmpty(&r); IntSetRangePopFront(&r)) {
    printf("%d\\n", IntSetRangeTakeFront(&r));
  }
  IntSetDestroy(&set);
}

Build sample program

cc -g -o sample sample.c sample_auto.c

Test sample with Valgrind

valgrind sample

Build & run test suite

Generate C test suite into tests_auto.[ch]

ruby -r autoc/scaffold -e tests

Build test suite

cc -g -o tests tests_auto.c

Witness the test suite run time correctness

valgrind tests

Create CMake project from template

Create CMake-powered skeleton project named runme in the current directory

ruby -r autoc/scaffold -e project runme

Configure the generated project

cmake .

Build the generated project

cmake --build .

Licensing & availability

This code is distributed under terms of the 2-clause BSD LICENSE.

The project's home page is GitHub.

The released ruby gems are published in RubyGems.

The condensed description of the changes is in the CHANGES.

Assorted related stuff

• STC

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Cheers && happy coding!

Oleg A. Khlybov fougas@mail.ru