Building and Installing Glibc

Abstract

The GNU C library, popularly known as Glibc, is the unseen force that makes GCC, most C language applications compiled with GCC on Linux systems, and all GNU/Linux systems work. Any code library provides a set of functions that simplify writing certain types of applications. In the case of the GNU C library, the applications facilitated by Glibc are any C programming language applications. The functions provided by Glibc range from functions as fundamental to C as printf() to Portable Operating System Interface for Computer Environments (POSIX) functions for opening low-level network connections (more about the latter later). The C programming language actually has a relatively small number of keywords; most of what people think of as C is actually standard C library functions that are implemented in Glibc.