Introduction

"smbase" stands for Scott McPeak's Base Library (sorry, naming things is not my specialty). It's a bunch of utility modules I use in virtually all of my projects. The entire library is in the public domain.

Some of the links below refer to generated documentation files. If you are reading this from your local filesystem, you may have to say "make gendoc" (after "./configure") to get them.

Build Instructions

  $ ./configure
  $ make
  $ make check

Module List

• array.h: GrowArray, a growable array; plus ArrayStack.
• arraymap.h: ArrayMap, a map from integers to object pointers.
• astlist.h: ASTList, a list class for use in abstract syntax trees.
• autofile.h, autofile.cc: AutoFILE, a simple wrapper around FILE* to open it or throw an exception, and automatically close it.
• bflatten.h, bflatten.cc: Implementation of the Flatten interface (flatten.h) for reading/writing binary files.
• bit2d.h, bit2d.cc: Two-dimensional array of bits.
• bitarray.h bitarray.cc: One-dimensional array of bits.
• breaker.h breaker.cpp: Function for putting a breakpoint in, to get debugger control just before an exception is thrown.
• ckheap.h: Interface to check heap integrity. The underlying malloc implementation must support these entry points for it to work. I've extended Doug Lea's malloc (malloc.c) to do so.
• crc.h crc.cpp: 32-bit cyclic redundancy check.
• cycles.h cycles.c: Report total number of processor cycles since the machine was turned on. Uses the RDTSC instruction on x86.
• datablok.h, datablok.cpp: DataBlock, an array of characters of a given length. Useful when the data may contain NUL ('\0') bytes.
• exc.h, exc.cpp: Various exception classes. The intent is derive everything from xBase, so a program can catch this one exception type in main() and be assured no exception will propagate out of the program (or any other unit of granularity you want).
• flatten.h, flatten.cc: Generic interface for serializing in-memory data structures to files. Similar to Java's Serializable, but independently conceived, and has superior version control facilities.
• growbuf.h, growbuf.cc: Extension of DataBlock (datablok.h) that provides an append() function.
• hashline.h, hashline.cc: HashLineMap, a mechanism for keeping track of #line directives in C source files. Provides efficient queries with respect to a set of such directives.
• hashtbl.h, hashtbl.cc: HashTable, a hash table.
• macros.h: A bunch of useful macros.
• malloc.c: Version 2.7.0 of Doug Lea's malloc. I've made some modifications to help with debugging of memory errors in client code.
• missing.h, missing.cpp: Implementations of a few C library functions that are not present on all platforms.
• mypopen.h, mypopen.c: Open a process, yielding two pipes: one for writing, one for reading.
• mysig.h, mysig.cc: Some signal-related utilities.
• nonport.h, nonport.cpp: A library of utility functions whose implementation is system-specific. Generally, I try to encapsulate all system depenencies as functions defined in nonport.
• objlist.h: ObjList, a general linked list of objects. ObjList considers itself to "own" (be responsible for deallocating) the things on its list. See also sobjlist.h.
• objpool.h: ObjPool, a custom allocator for fixed-size objects with embedded 'next' links.
• objstack.h: ObjStack, a stack of owned objects. Built with a linked list.
• ohashtbl.h OwnerHashTable, a hash table that owns the values.
• okhasharr.h: OwnerKHashArray, a combination of an owner hash table and an array/stack.
• okhashtbl.h: OwnerKHashTable, a version of okhasharr.h with type-safe keys ("k" for keys).
• point.h, point.cc: Point, a pair of integers.
• sobjlist.h: SObjList, a general linked list of objects. SObjList does not consider itself the owner of the list elements. The "s" in the name stands for "serf", which I use to mean the opposite of "owner". See also objlist.h.
• sobjset.h: SObjSet, a non-owning set of objects implemented with a hashtable.
• sobjstack.h: SObjStack, a stack of non-owned objects. Built with a linked list.
• srcloc.h srcloc.cc: This module maintains a one-word data type called SourceLoc. SourceLoc is a location within some file, e.g. line/col or character offset information. SourceLoc also encodes which file it refers to. This type is very useful for language processors (like compilers) because it efficiently encodes location formation. Decoding this into human-readable form is slower than incrementally updating it, but decoding is made somewhat efficient with some appropriate index structures.
• str.h, str.cpp: A string class, predating the C++ standard's version.
• strdict.h, strdict.cc: StringDict, a case-sensitive map from strings to void* pointers. Built with a linked list. Obsolete; use StringHash or StringVoidDict instead.
• strhash.h strhash.cc: StringHash, a case-sensitive map from strings to void* pointers. Built with a hash table. See also svdict.h.
• stringset.h, stringset.cc: StringSet, a set of strings.
• strobjdict.h: StringObjDict, a case-sensitive map from strings to object pointers. The dictionary owns the referred-to objects.
• strsobjdict.h: StringSObjDict, a case-sensitive map from strings to object pointers. The dictionary does not own the referred-to objects.
• strtokp.h, strtokp.cpp: StrtokParse, a class that parses a string similar to how strtok() works, but provides a more convenient (and thread-safe) interface. Similar to Java's StringTokenizer.
• strutil.h, strutil.cc: A set of generic string utilities, including replace(), translate(), trimWhitespace(), encodeWithEscapes(), etc.
• svdict.h, svdict.cc: StringVoidDict, a case-sensitive map from strings to void* pointers. Built on top of StringHash (strhash.h), it differs in that it supports a slightly more powerful interface, including query-then-modify-result.
• syserr.h, syserr.cpp: Intended to be a portable encapsulation of system-dependent error facilities like UNIX's errno and Win32's GetLastError(). It's not very complete right now.
• test.h: A few test-harness macros.
• trace.h, trace.cc: Module for recording and querying a set of debug tracing flags. It is documented in trace.html.
• trdelete.h, trdelete.cc: An operator delete which overwrites the deallocated memory with 0xAA before deallocating it.
• typ.h: Some type definitions like byte and bool, plus a few utility macros. Not clearly distinguished from macros.h in purpose.
• unixutil.h, unixutil.c: Some utilities on top of unix functions: writeAll(), readString().
• vdtllist.h, vdtllist.cc: VoidTailList, the core of a linked list implementation which maintains a pointer to the last node for O(1) appends. Used by astlist.h.
• voidlist.h, voidlist.cc: The core of the linked list implementation used by objlist.h and sobjlist.h.
• warn.h, warn.cpp: Intended to provide a general interface for user-level warnings, the design never really worked well.
• xassert.h: xassert is an assert()-like macro that throws an exception when it fails, instead of calling abort().
• xobjlist.h: This file is processed by M4 to make objlist.h and sobjlist.h.

Test drivers. Below are the modules that are purely test drivers for other modules. They're separated out from the list above to avoid the clutter.

• testmalloc.cc: A program to test the interface exposed by ckheap.h.
• tmalloc.c: Test my debugging enhancements to malloc.c.
• tobjlist.cc: Test driver for objlist.h.
• tobjpool.cc Test driver for objpool.h.
• tsobjlist.cc: Test driver for sobjlist.h.

Module Dependencies

The scan-depends.pl script is capable of generating a module dependency description in the Dot format. Not all the modules appear; I try to show the most important modules, and try to avoid making Dot do weird things. Below is its output.

There's also a Postscript version.