Al-Hikam: Hikmah 80

"Allah melapangkan keadaanmu agar engkau tidak tetap dalam kesempitan, dan Allah menyempitkan keadaanmu agar engkau tidak terus dalam kelapangan, dan Dia melepaskanmu dari keduanya agar engkau terbebas dari sesuatu selain-Nya."

Android Native libc Bionic library

Submitted by danang.wijanarko on Thu, 03/03/2011 - 14:51 ◊

Google developed a custom library for the C compiler (libc) called Bionic. This was necessary for three main reasons:

License: they wanted to keep GPL out of user-space. Bionic code uses the BSD license.
Size: the library has to be loaded in each process, so it needs to be small. Bionic is about 200K, or half the size of glibc (the GNU version of libc).
Speed: limited CPU power means it needs to be fast. Bionic has a small size and fast code paths, including a very fast and small custom pthread implementation.

Bionic has built-in support for important Android-specific services such as system properties and logging. It doesn’t support certain POSIX features, like C++ exceptions and wide chars, which were not needed on Android. Thus it’s not quite compatible with the gnu libc. All native code must be compiled against bionic, not glibc.