ringbuf is a simple ring buffer implementation in C.
It includes support for read(2) and write(2) operations on ring buffers, memcpy’s into and out of ring buffers, setting the buffer contents to a constant value, and copies between ring buffers. It also supports searching for single characters, for use with line-oriented or character-delimited network protocols.
It should be fairly straightforward to extend ringbuf to support other C library operations that operate on buffers, e.g., recv(2).
I implemented ringbuf because I needed a simple, dependency-free ring buffer type for use with network services written in C.
ringbuf is not a library as such, so it doesn’t need to be installed. Just copy the ringbuf.[ch] source files into your project. (Also see LICENSE below.)
ringbuf has no dependencies beyond an ISO C90 standard library.
Note that ringbuf.c contains several assert() statements. These are intended for use with the test harness (see below), and should probably be removed from production code, once you’re confident that ringbuf works as intended.
This distribution includes source for a test program executable (ringbuf-test.c), which runs extensive unit tests on the ringbuf implementation. On most platforms (other than Windows, which is not supported), you should be able to type ‘make’ to run the unit tests. Note that the Makefile uses the clang C compiler by default, but also has support for gcc – just edit the Makefile so that it uses gcc instead of clang.
The Makefile also includes targets for gcov coverage testing and valgrind memory testing, assuming you have those tools installed on your system.
ringbuf has no license; it is dedicated to the public domain. See the file COPYING, included in this distribution, for the specifics.
Drew Hess <dhess-src@bothan.net>