What is "Generic C"?

Question

I am a programming student and have occasionally encountered references to: Generic C, does this mean just plain classic C?

"generic c/c++ implementations for commonly used data structures in any serious piece of software"

It typically appears in contexts such as this; I am pretty sure that I have simply been misreading such references as (generic c)/c++ rather than: generic (c/c++). it looks like it is probably referring to a set of libraries. Thanks for all your replies.

Perhaps the term is ["Clean C"](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9694776/what-is-clean-c-and-how-does-it-differ-from-standard-c)? — , Feb 07 '13 at 00:59
It probably means ANSI C. In other words, standard C without any platform-specific extensions, e.g. POSIX, Win32 etc. — Charles Salvia, Feb 07 '13 at 01:00
Hard to say. Perhaps it is a reference to [this project](https://github.com/harnold/generic-c). — jxh, Feb 07 '13 at 01:01
Where have you seen these references? Can you provide some context? — Carl Norum, Feb 07 '13 at 01:06
It might also mean "C, as opposed to C++". It is hard to say. — nneonneo, Feb 07 '13 at 01:08
More context please. Usually the term "C/C++" is used in a rough sense to mean C code which is compatible with C++. — Potatoswatter, Feb 07 '13 at 02:22

Tony Delroy · Answer 1 · 2013-02-11T15:41:43.823

generic c/c++ implementations for commonly used data structures in any serious piece of software"

Here, generic and c/c++ are just distinct adjectives listed in front of implementations of data structures; could equivalently have said "c/c++ generic implementations..." or "generic implementation in c/c++" etc.. Data structures such as lists and binary trees are commonly used for arbitrary data types like int, double and user-defined structures. Implementations that allow the data structure code to be reused for arbitrary types are called "generic" implementations.

In C, examples are the standard library's binary search and quick sort functions, which accept data without understanding the content of the memory, as well as pointers to functions to call to perform meaningful interpretation of the data. See http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdlib/qsort/ and http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdlib/bsearch/

In C++, templates provide better support for generic data structures, with the Standard Library hosting generic vectors, lists, (binary tree associative) maps, double-ended queues, stacks, more recently hash tables termed unordered_maps etc..

What is "Generic C"?

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