Common Trace Format - Standards, Extensions and Libraries Mathieu Desnoyers September 26, 2010
This document describes the CTF library dependencies on standards, extensions and libraries.
This library is C99 compliant. A non-documented non-compliance should be reported as a bug. See the ISO/IEC 9899:TC2 publication:
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1124.pdf
The IEEE 754-2008 standard is used for binary floating point arithmetic representation. See:
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/754/
This library uses some widely GNU/C extensions widely adopted by compilers. For detail, see:
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/C-Extensions.html#C-Extensions
In some cases, standards do not provide the required primitives to write portable code; these are listed here.
endian.h is used to provide the following definitions:
#define LITTLE_ENDIAN 1234
#define BIG_ENDIAN 4321
#define BYTE_ORDER /* Your architecture: BIG_ENDIAN or LITTLE_ENDIAN */
The ISO/IEC 9899 standard leaves bitfields implementation defined, which is unacceptable for portability of this library. Section 6.7.2.1 - "Structure and union specifiers", Semantic 10 specifically indicates that padding and order of bit-fields allocation within a unit is implementation-defined.
This is why this library provides the bitfield.h header (under the MIT license), which specifies bitfields write primitives that uses the same field order as the GNU/C compiler, but does not require any padding for fields spreading across units. This is therefore a superset of the GNU/C bitfields, which can be dealt with by detecting C structure padding manually given the bit offset and bit-field size as well as the unit size.
The library glib 2 is used for its basic data structures. See
http://library.gnome.org/devel/glib/2.24/glib-data-types.html