Pretty Petite Picolibc Powers Processors

Many times when someone tells you that language X is “better” at something they really mean that it has better built-in libraries for that task. Java is a great example. The language isn’t all that different from C++ outside of garbage collection and multiple inheritance, but the standard libraries are super powerful, especially for networking.  Even C relies on a library to provide a lot of functions people think of as part of the language — printf, for example. That’s not really part of the C language, but just part of the standard library. When you are writing for a tiny processor, the choice of library is critical and [Keith Packard] offers you one choice: picolibc.

The library has its genesis from two other diminutive libraries: Newlib and the AVR version of libc. It provides support for ARC, ARM, i386, m68k, MIPS, MSP430, Nios II, PPC, RISC-V, Sparc64, x86_64, and the ESP8266/ESP32.

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