Introduction

Overview

Libircclient is a small but extremely powerful library which implements the client IRC protocol. It is designed to be small, fast, portable and compatible with the RFC standards as well as non-standard but popular features. It is perfect for building the IRC clients and bots.

Features

  • Comprehensive C API;
  • Full coverage of the IRC protocol using providing functions;
  • Supports multiple simultaneous connection to different IRC servers or even to the same server;
  • Supports both plain and SSL connections to the IRC servers with the optional certificate check;
  • Full multi-threading support, the library is thread-safe;
  • All the processing could be handled by a single thread even if multiple connections are used;
  • Non-blocking, asynchronous event-based interface implemented with callbacks;
  • Extra support for the socket-based applications, which use select();
  • CTCP support with optional build-in reply code;
  • Supports CTCP PING necessary to pass the “spoof check” implemented by most IRC servers;
  • Flexible DCC support, including both DCC chat, and DCC file transfer;
  • Can both initiate and react to initiated DCC;
  • Can accept or decline DCC sessions asynchronously;
  • Written in plain C, very small binary size (around 30K depending on platform);
  • Compatible all tested IRC clients;
  • Free software licensed under the LGPLv3 license;
  • Supports Linux as well as any POSIX-compliant Unix, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows;
  • Supports 32/64bit architectures as well as non-x86 architectures;
  • IPv6 support (optional, must be compiled in);
  • OpenSSL support (optional, must be compiled in);
  • Cocoa interface by Nathan Ollerenshaw;
  • Comprehensive documentation, examples and the FAQ;

Known issues

Even though possible by using multiple sessions, the library is not suitable to connect to a large number of IRC servers simultaneously. If you still want to use it, you’d have to overcome the following:

  • You cannot use the main loop in irc_run() because it only supports one session. You would have to use irc_add_select_descriptors()
  • You’d have to handle reconnections separately by processing the relevant irc_process_select_descriptors() return values
  • If you wish to use poll/epoll() instead of select() you’d have to write more logic as it is not directly supported. See the FAQ.
  • The library is not optimized to have a low per-connection memory footprint, each non-SSL connection uses at least 4K, with around 32K per connection for SSL.

Author

This library is created by George Yunaev, copyright 2004-2013.

License

Libircclient is licensed under Lesser General Public License version 3 or higher. The complete license text is provided in the Appendix.

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