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mpaland
printf
C++2020–2023
mpaland / printf

printf

Tiny, fast, non-dependent and fully loaded printf implementation for embedded systems. Extensive test suite passing.

3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Tiny, fast, non-dependent and fully loaded printf implementation for embedded systems. Extensive test suite passing.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year3 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-05-06 20:12:25 UTC to 2023-03-27 12:16:33 UTC.

0122020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

3 sources
Seems unlikely. My spot check of the the two vfprintf implementations shows no flow from one to the other, and shows that part of the Cosmopolitan code has an older lineage than nolibc. The nolibc source has many reference to copyright held by "Willy Tarreau", under LGPL-2.1 OR MIT license, with a copyright date starting in 2017. The string "Tarreau" does not exist in the Cosmopolitan library, so that's a strong negative there. Let's look closer. The file organization is quite different. And so is the implementation. So that's another negative. Compare the vfprintf in nolibc at https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.2-rc4/source/tools/inclu... (a 'minimal vfprintf()') with the one in cosmopolitan starting at https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/stdio/.... Right away we can see nolibc places many functions in the same file wh
Read the rest
ile Cosmopolitan uses a one-function-per-filename organization. Cosmopolitan's fvprintf locks the file (which nolibc doesn't need to do) then calls vfprintf_unlocked which calls __fmt at https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/fmt/fm... , which is the actual implementation. It look very different from NOLIBC's. Okay, so perhaps that's they way now but not at the beginning? We can also go back to Cosmopolitan's original implementation and see how vfprintf goes through https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/c91b3c50068224929c... to call "palandprintf", which https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/c91b3c50068224929c... says is copyright "Marco Paland" from 2014-2019. That's a few years older than the start of nolibc, available from https://github.com/mpaland/printf , and part of https://github.com/embeddedartistry/libc , a "libc targeted for embedded systems usage". Thus, multiple factors seem to agree that nolibc code is not used in the Cosmopolitan library.
In Nolibc: A minimal C-library replacement shipped with the kernel

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