Software libraries are a longstanding, easy, and sensible way to reuse code. This article explains how to build libraries from scratch and make them available to clients. Although the two sample libraries target Linux, the steps for creating, publishing, and using these libraries apply to other Unix-like systems.

The sample libraries are written in C, which is well suited to the task. The Linux kernel is written mostly in C with the rest in assembly language. (The same goes for Windows and Linux cousins such as macOS.) The standard system libraries for input/output, networking, string processing, mathematics, security, data encoding, and so on are likewise written mainly in C. To write a library in C is therefore to write in Linux’s native language. Moreover, C sets the mark for performance among high-level languages.

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