Carbonhas been a dream so far, we haven’t found a single bug and it’s super easy to work with. (⸮)
- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Carbon is the ultimate tiny and easy to use high-level library for C/C++ written in C11/C++14.
It even can be used to test any piece of C/C++ code; thus, working as a full-fledged testing suite.
If you’d like to make a contribution, you can check the project’s guidelines; also, keep an eye on both security issues reporting instructions and our Code of Conduct. Furthermore, if you do something cool with Carbon, don’t forget to add the #sk-cbn tag to your topics! 👍
We use CI/CD to ensure the final product has the expected level of quality, if not more 🚀. This is the summary of the pipelines being run:
| Kind | Target | Status |
| CI (Continuous Integration) | master |  |
| CD (Continuous Deployment) | master/docs/www |  |
Do you want to keep up with changes or do you have a question that doesn’t require you to open an issue?
Join the GitHub Discussions forum, meet other users like you. The more we are, the better for everyone.
There you can ask questions, exchange ideas, share some of your work, make polls, stay up to date with new updates and announcements of the library, and much more.
Do you want to support Carbon? Consider becoming a sponsor, or making a donation via Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee.
Many thanks to all of you who are reading this; I hope it’ll be useful and it’ll make you enjoy programming a little bit more.
Warning
Carbon is currently in an alpha quality stage, and is not production-ready yet.
Carbon can operate in both header-only and externally-linked (static or dynamic) modes, it’s just a matter of defining the CARBON_IMPLEMENTATION macro ONCE in our codebase.
We can get Carbon in our preferred way of managing dependencies or external libraries in our projects. It’s important to do so via the OFFICIAL Git repository hosted on GitHub, and not through any other website or server. Appart from that, any ref can be checked out, being master (the trunk of all dev progress), a tagged commit (e.g. v1.0), an actively maintained version branch (e.g. v1.0.y/stable) or a LTS version branch (e.g. v1.0.y/lts) the preferred ones.
Here are the main options of obtaining it:
Git Submodule:
git submodule add https://github.com/sparky-game/carbon vendor/carbonCMake FetchContent:
include(FetchContent)
FetchContent_Declare(
carbon
GIT_REPOSITORY "https://github.com/sparky-game/carbon"
GIT_TAG [...]
GIT_PROGRESS TRUE
)
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(carbon)Pre-compiled Package:
You might want to take a look to the latest release available and download the appropriate pre-compiled package for your CPU’s architecture and OS.
If wanted to build Carbon from source independently (i.e. without defining CARBON_IMPLEMENTATION in your code), it can be done without any problems. We use a custom make utility (which uses Carbon under the hood) as our build system to manage testing, compiling and packaging the library.
This custom build system can rebuild itself properly (using our preferred compilation flags), which means that you’ll only need to bootstrap it once:
cc src/make.c -o makeOnce built, we can take a look at the available subcommands and options by issuing: ./make help.
A good place to start learning and discovering all the things you can do with Carbon is reading and executing the examples. One can issue the command ./make examples to build them all; for each example source file (.c or .cc) it produces a .bin executable file, which can be run normally without problems.
Copyright (C) Wasym A. Alonso. All Rights Reserved.
Carbon is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 (GNU AGPL-3.0) as published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) on November 19th 2007.
Carbon is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 for more details.
For more information, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.
As mentioned above, Carbon is licensed under the GNU’s AGPL-3.0-only, which means that any software created or that uses it is also subject to the same license. This implies that if you develop an application using Carbon, it must also be released as free software under the GNU’s AGPL-3.0-only. This ensures that the freedoms to use, study, modify and share the software are preserved for everyone.
If you prefer to release your application under a different, more commercially friendly license, there is an option available. You can purchase a copy of the Carbon Runtime Library Exception (Carbon RLE), which is in essence a GPL Exception, for you to use this library without releasing your software under GNU’s AGPL-3.0-only. Some key aspects of the Carbon RLE are the following:
- One-Time Purchase (OTP): Once obtaining a copy of the RLE, it lasts forever without expiration date.
- Project-specific: Each RLE is tied to a single project of yours.
- Version compatibility: Each RLE applies to a specific branch or minor version of Carbon (e.g.
v1.0.y/lts), enabling you to update the library to a more up-to-date version with the same RLE. - Professional support: You also gain access to more advanced support regarding the library, as well as a private channel to make high-priority requests such as bug fixes or security vulnerabilities.
For more details and to acquire a copy of the Carbon RLE, please visit https://libcarbon.org.
- Benno Rice. (2018, January 23). You Can’t Unit Test C, Right? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-uWt5wVVkU
- Alexey Kutepov. (2023, June 30). tsoding/nn.h: Simple stb-style header-only library for Neural Networks [Code]. GitHub. https://github.com/tsoding/nn.h
- Alexey Kutepov. (2024, November 5). tsoding/nob.h: Next generation of the NoBuild idea [Code]. GitHub. https://github.com/tsoding/nob.h
- Daniel Holden. (2021, April 16). orangeduck/Cello: Higher level programming in C [Code]. GitHub. https://github.com/orangeduck/Cello
- Sean Barrett. (2015, June 7). Advice for Writing Small Programs in C [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAhWIO1Ra6M
- Charm. (2024, November 8). charmbracelet/vhs: Your CLI home video recorder 📼 [Code]. GitHub. https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs
- Alshahwan, N., Chheda, J., Finegenova, A., Gokkaya, B., Harman, M., Harper, I., Marginean, A., Sengupta, S., Wang, E. (2024, February 14). Automated Unit Test Improvement using Large Language Models at Meta [Paper]. arXiv, Cornell University. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.09171
- Matsumoto, M., Nishimura, T. (1998, January 1). Mersenne twister: a 623-dimensionally equidistributed uniform pseudo-random number generator [Paper]. Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). https://doi.org/10.1145/272991.272995
- Nishimura, T. (2000, October 1). Tables of 64-bit Mersenne twisters [Paper]. Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). https://doi.org/10.1145/369534.369540
- Matsumoto, M., Nishimura, T. (2004, September 29). A C-program for MT19937-64 (2004/9/29 version) [Code]. Department of Mathematics, Hiroshima University. http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/m-mat/MT/VERSIONS/C-LANG/mt19937-64.c
- Alexey Kutepov. (2025, February 3). tsoding/coroutines: Custom coroutines implementation in GNU C [Code]. GitHub. https://github.com/tsoding/coroutines
