uClibc Is Still Around As A Lightweight C Standard Library

The uClibc project is still advancing as a lightweight, performant C standard library even while glibc has been making performance advancements and other improvements as well.

Alexey Brodkin of Synopsys spoke at this week's Embedded Linux Conference Europe about how uClibc is still relevant today and "makes sense" for organizations like Synopsys.

The uClibc library is used by projects like OpenWRT/LEDE on ARC architecture, OpenADK, Lilblue in Gentoo, Buildroot, and for architectures like NDS32 / Xtense / Blackfin. But in recent years Alpine Linux, OpenEmbedded, and OpenWRT/LEDE for other architectures have switched to instead using musl libc.

The uClibc library supports 28 different processor architectures compared to glibc supporting 18 and musl supporting 12. The uClibc library remains smaller as well than glibc and even the competing musl libc embedded implementation.

Roadmap items for uClibc include continued support for existing features and architectures, improving warnings/errors as a result of their test suite, and add new architecture support.

Those wishing to check out Alexey's ELCE 2017 presentation on uClibc can find the presentation slides in PDF form.