Picolibc Continues Seeing Improvements, Contributions From Arm

Picolibc is a newer C library implementation written by longtime free software developer Keith Packard with a focus on being lightweight for embedded systems. Last year marked the release of Picolibc 1.0 while work on it hasn't let up.

Picolibc was born in part from code found within Newlib and AVR's libc. Picolibc 1.1 followed the 1.0 release last year but since then there hasn't been too much to report on this libc implementation. This weekend though longtime X11 developer Keith Packard outlined some of the recent progress on this libc.

Keith has been working recently on fixing some memory allocation bugs, cleaning up its math library, and other optimizations. Picolibc has also seen some new code sponsored by Arm with two of their engineers working to improve the performance of some of the core math functions. The Arm-contributed code makes use of hardware FMA instructions and other optimizations.

For those interested in this lightweight, cross-architecture, open-source libc implementation can find the latest work outlined via Keith's blog.