What is Libft?
Libft was an individual project at Hive Helsinki that requires the recreation of some standard C library functions from scratch. The goal was to gain a deeper understanding of how these fundamental functions work and to create a custom library that will be used in future projects.
Key Objectives
Recreate standard C library functions: Reimplement functions like strlen, strcpy, atoi and others to understand how they work- Master C fundamentals: Grasp core concepts like memory management, string manipulation and character handling
- Learn advanced techniques: Linked lists and function pointers
- Create a custom library: Develop a C library, which will be used in other Hive projects
Writing the code
The process for writing the code for each individual function was quite straightforward: Study how the original function works, read the man page, then write the code and tests to make sure it works in every possible situation imaginable (no arguments, empty arguments, null arguments, etc.). With very little past C coding experience, the last part proved to be most difficult one.
Testing with 3rd party scripts
After writing the code for the functions for the first time, running testing scripts found on GitHub proved to be invaluable. The tests exposed a large number of issues - some of which resulted from edge cases - that needed to be patched. As a beginner in C coding, finding the ways to implement the wide variety of necessary protections would have been a massive undertaking without the help of the scripts. It is expected that the rigorousness of the tests will pay off in the later projects that will use the functions created in this one.