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rustyrussell
ccan
C2013–2025
rustyrussell / ccan

ccan

The C Code Archive Network

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7Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The C Code Archive Network

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, 3:56:07 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 year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-06-15 07:26:00 UTC to 2025-07-01 10:13:22 UTC.

0122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

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
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

9 sources
codys·Mar 10, 2022
For more advanced intrusive lists in C, I've found that ccan's tlist2 (https://github.com/rustyrussell/ccan/blob/master/ccan/tlist2...) provides a decent model here. Compared to the linux kernel's intrusive lists, it also tracks the offset of the list_node within the structure contained by the list, which eliminates another class of problems. It does still have the "using the iterator after the for loop is over" issue discussed in this article, but it also already tracks the types as Linus proposed doing in the article to resolve the issue.
In Toward a better list iterator for the Linux kernel
vineel567·Mar 8, 2020
I am in the same boat as you are...bare with me by no means I am an expert. In fact, I read couple of chapters in Modern C yesterday :). Here are some of the things I am doing to improve my C skills to match with some of the admired/professional developers. Decide which platform to use ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Unfortunately, to become proficient in it we need to write code and focus on a platform. I have been fighting between whether to develop on Windows vs Linux. I am very experienced in Windows environment(using debuggers/cl/linkers/Windbg etc) but when it comes to writing good quality C code(not C++) and for learning how to write good maintainable moderately large source code, my research showed that Windows compilers/C standard APIs are not great, in fact they hinder your productivity. I have wasted countless number of hours to just figure
Read the rest
out how to properly create a simple C project with a decent build system. Unfortunately, I could not find one. The closest I could find is CMake as MSBuild is a nightmare to work with. I even tried NMAKE but failed. When it comes to documentation of finding basic C Api usage, MSDN(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/run-t...) does a decent job. But in the name of security you will find zillion variations(_s, _l) of an API and by default msvc compiler will not let you use some of the API in their simple forms. Instead, you have to define _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS etc. I think for someone just getting started to develop/learn to write a decent code base in C these restrictions really hinder the productivity. So finally, I have decided to instead focus my learning on Linux platform(currently through WSL - Windows subsystem for Linux) with its POSIX apis. You know what, `man 3 printf` or `man 3 strlen` is soooooo much better than googling msdn Mastering C ~~~~~~~ I think, the simple and straight answer here is reading good code and writing "good" code and also reading good C content(be it books or articles). I think these are the three ingredients necessary to get started. Of all the open source projects that I have investigated, I found Linux Kernel and related projects seems to have very good taste in terms of code quality. Currently, I am just focused how they use the language rather than what they actually do in the project. Things like, how they structure the project, how they name things, how they use types, how they create structures, how they pass structures to function, how they use light weight object based constructs, how they handle errors in function(for example forward only goto exits), how they use signed/unsigned variables etc(more of my learnings to the end), how they use their own data structures. I think its good to initially focus/target on ANSI C API with C99 instead of heavily relying on the OS specific API on which ever platform you choose. For example, such projects could be writing binary file parsers for example projects like .ISO file format etc. Good C projects/articles ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1. Winlib.net - https://github.com/jcpowermac/wimlib is a great source of information 2. e2fsprogs - https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/fs/ext2/e2fsprogs.git/ 3. MUSL - https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/ 4. General C Coding Style - https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... 4. https://nullprogram.com/tags/c/ - great source of C knowledge 5. CCAN - https://github.com/rustyrussell/ccan/tree/master/ccan - great source of C tidbits from none other than Rusty Russell - I haven't read all of them 6. POSIX 2018 standard - https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition... continued in the comment....
In Ask HN: How do I learn C properly?

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