I have not forgotten about this. I'm currently working on libmetaldata which contains common code to other personal projects and will be reused in here.

This is an implementation of the C standard library designed for use by:

• Programs that run with absolutely no underlying system (not even EFI),
• UEFI-aware OS kernels, or
• UEFI applications.

This library requires your C compiler to provide a few headers of its own, namely:

• float.h
• limits.h
• stdarg.h
• stddef.h
• stdint.h (a partial shim is provided that'll work for some systems without it)

GCC and compatible compilers' freestanding mode provides all of these headers. Some versions of Visual Studio don't have stdint.h when building for the C99 standard, even though that header is part of the standard.

I really don't want to pay USD 201.10 for a copy of the C standard from the ISO's website. Therefore, the bulk of this library is built on me going through the standard library reference on cplusplus.com, implementing functions one by one, and testing them against the GCC implementation.

While I will do my absolute best to keep this as close as possible to expected behavior, I cannot guarantee this is 100% accurate.

This library can be compiled in one of several modes, depending on the needs of the program linking to it.

• Bare: Assumes no underlying system support. Many features such as I/O require hooks to be implemented by the code using the library.
• UEFI Application: Uses the UEFI boot services to provide I/O, memory allocation, etc. Useful for writing OS bootloaders and UEFI applications, but not OS kernels.
• UEFI Kernel: Uses the UEFI runtime API. Useful for OS kernels that rely on UEFI for certain hardware access.

Pointers must be exactly 16, 32, or 64 bits.

To build this library you'll need:

• CMake 3.13 or higher.
• A compiler supporting ANSI C99 or later, such as GCC, MinGW, OpenWatcom, etc. Visual Studio may or may not work.
• (UEFI modes only) If you're not building with an LLVM-based compiler like Clang, you'll also need a UEFI cross-compiler, such as GNU_EFI or TianoCore.

Compilers I'm trying to get this to work for:

• BCC
• GCC and GCC-compatible compilers like MinGW and Clang
• FAUCC
• Intel C compiler (ICC)
• OpenWatcom
• TCC
• Visual Studio (low priority)

1. Run ./configure with whatever options you need.
2. cmake -S . -B build
3. make -C build

If everything compiled correctly, the following files will be generated:

• include/metalc/: The header files you'll need when using the library
• build/lib:
  • libmetalc.so (extension could be .dll or .dylib depending on your OS): the shared library for dynamic linking.
  • libmetalcstatic.a (extension could also be ".lib" depending on your OS): the object file library for static linking.

You can ignore the other files.

I'm releasing this under the terms of the New BSD License. See LICENSE.txt for the full legal text.