The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project implementation of the C standard library. It provides a wrapper around the system calls of the Linux kernel and other kernels for application use. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++ . It was started in the 1980s by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU operating system.
glibc is free software released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The GNU C Library project provides the core libraries for the GNU system, as well as many systems that use Linux as the kernel. These libraries provide critical APIs including ISO C11, POSIX.1-2008, BSD, OS-specific APIs and more. These APIs include such foundational facilities as open, read, write, malloc, printf, getaddrinfo, dlopen, pthread_create, crypt, login, exit and more.