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Containers

This library provides various containers. Each container has utility functions to manipulate the data it holds. This is an abstraction as to not have to manually manage and reallocate memory.

From bkthomps·Updated June 6, 2026·View on GitHub·

This library provides various containers. Each container has utility functions to manipulate the data it holds. This is an abstraction as to not have to manually manage and reallocate memory. The project is written primarily in C, distributed under the MIT License license, first published in 2017. Key topics include: array, avl-tree, collection, collections, container.

Latest release: v1.2.2
November 16, 2025View Changelog →

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Containers

This library provides various containers. Each container has utility functions
to manipulate the data it holds. This is an abstraction as to not have to
manually manage and reallocate memory.

Inspired by the C++ standard library; however, implemented using C with
different function interfaces as the C++ standard library but with the same
container names.

Setup

It is possible to compile this library as either static .a or dynamic .so:

  1. A static library is slightly faster than a dynamic one, however, if the
    library is modified, the entire project codebase which uses it will need to be
    relinked.
  2. A dynamic library can be changed without relinking the codebase, assuming
    no function definitions have changed.

The installation process is as follows:

  1. Clone this repository and navigate to it.
  2. Run make static_clang/make static_gcc or
    make dynamic_clang/make dynamic_gcc for either a static or dynamic library.
  3. Then, you can copy-paste containers.h and containers.a/containers.so
    into your project to include the containers.
  4. Finally, you remember to link the library by including
    containers.a -ldl/containers.so -ldl as an argument.

Documentation

For high-level documentation and usage, visit the
documentation page. For in-depth documentation, visit the
code docs page.

Container Types

The container types that this library contains are described below.

Sequence containers

Data structures which can be accessed sequentially.

  • array - static contiguous array
  • vector - dynamic contiguous array
  • deque - double-ended queue
  • forward_list - singly-linked list
  • list - doubly-linked list

Associative containers

Data structures that can be quickly searched which use comparators.

  • set - collection of unique keys, sorted by keys
  • map - collection of key-value pairs, sorted by keys, keys are unique
  • multiset - collection of keys, sorted by keys
  • multimap - collection of key-value pairs, sorted by keys

Unordered associative containers

Data structures that can be quickly searched which use hashing.

  • unordered_set - collection of unique keys, hashed by keys
  • unordered_map - collection of key-value pairs, hashed by keys, keys are unique
  • unordered_multiset - collection of keys, hashed by keys
  • unordered_multimap - collection of key-value pairs, hashed by keys

Container adaptors

Data structures which adapt other containers to enhance functionality.

  • stack - adapts a container to provide stack (last-in first-out)
  • queue - adapts a container to provide queue (first-in first-out)
  • priority_queue - adapts a container to provide priority queue

Contributors

Showing top 2 contributors by commit count.

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This article is auto-generated from bkthomps/Containers via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/27/2026