🧱 libft — 42 Paris Project

Rebuilding the fundamental bricks of the C standard library and creating a personal reusable library for future 42 projects.

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Table of contents

• Context
• Objectives
• Highlights
• Documentation
• Repository Overview
• Build
• 42 Peer-to-Peer Evaluations

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🎓 Context

This project is the very first milestone of the 42 Paris curriculum.

Its purpose is to reimplement core functions of the C standard library (strlen, memcpy, strchr, …), while progressively extending it with higher-level utilities, in order to build a robust and reusable personal C library: libft.

This library is designed to be reused across most 42 projects
(ft_printf, push_swap, minishell, …)
and to serve as a long-term foundation for all future C developments.

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⚙️ Objectives

• Reimplement libc fundamentals (strings, memory, characters, conversions)
• Provide safe and reusable abstractions on top of low-level C APIs
• Add extended utilities beyond the mandatory subject:
  • dynamic buffers (buff_*)
  • linked lists
  • math helpers
  • formatted output helpers
• Ensure:
  • strict 42 Norm compliance
  • no memory leaks
  • well-defined API contracts (ownership, lifetime, error handling)

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✨ Highlights

• 📦 Dynamic growable buffer API (buff_*)
  Designed to minimize reallocations and simplify string / I/O manipulation.

• 🧠 Explicit memory contracts
  Ownership, borrowing, and lifetime rules are documented for all public APIs.

• 🛠 Extended utility set
  Helpers that go beyond the libc scope while remaining dependency-free.

• 📚 Fully documented public API
  Automatically generated documentation using Doxygen.

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📚 Documentation

The full API documentation is generated from the source code using Doxygen.

It focuses on public interfaces, while internal helpers remain accessible through call graphs for deeper understanding.

➡️ Browse the libft API documentation

The documentation describes:

• function contracts
• ownership & lifetime rules
• warnings and undefined behavior
• public data structures

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🗂️ Repository overview

libft/
├── libft.h            # Public API
├── src/               # Implementations
├── docs/
│   ├── Doxyfile       # Doxygen configuration
│   └── html/          # Generated API documentation
├── Makefile
└── README.md

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🧰 Build

Basic build:

make        # build libft.a

Clean up:

make clean  # remove object files
make fclean # remove objects and library

Rebuild:

make re     # full rebuild

Generate documentation locally:

make doc	# generate docs/html/* files

Run unit tests (using my own test framework)

make test	# run unit tests

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💯 42 Peer-to-Peer Evaluations

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“Build your own standard library, and you’ll never fear undefined behavior again.” 🙃