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 useirc_add_select_descriptors()
You’d have to handle reconnections separately by processing the relevant
irc_process_select_descriptors()
return valuesIf 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.
License¶
Libircclient is licensed under Lesser General Public License version 3 or higher. The complete license text is provided in the Appendix.