libxtc 0.4.0
Async concurrency for C: Tokio + Seastar + BEAM, in one library
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xtc

A concurrency runtime for serious C programs.

xtc gives C the same asynchronous, fault-tolerant, predictable-latency foundation that Tokio gives Rust, that the BEAM gives Erlang, and that Seastar gives C++. It is a single library you can link against to write network servers, databases, queues, schedulers, and any other long-lived service that needs to handle thousands of connections, recover from faults, and stay inside a fixed resource budget on commodity hardware.

+-------------------------------------------------------+
| your program |
+-------------------------------------------------------+
| orchestration: supervisor app registry gen_server|
+-------------------------------------------------------+
| primitives: proc channel lwlock lrlock lockmgr |
| rcu slab mctx res log |
+-------------------------------------------------------+
| event runtime: loop task timer fiber executor |
+-------------------------------------------------------+
| I/O substrate: io_uring epoll kqueue IOCP poll |
+-------------------------------------------------------+
| OS substrate: alloc atomic time thread tls mutex |
+-------------------------------------------------------+

Why you might want this

  • You are writing a server in C and you want async I/O without building it from scratch. xtc gives you a backend-pluggable event loop (io_uring, epoll, kqueue, IOCP, poll, select) under a uniform API, with non-blocking task scheduling and fiber-based coroutines.
  • You need fault tolerance. xtc has Erlang-style processes with links and monitors, supervisors with the four canonical strategies (one_for_one, one_for_all, rest_for_one, simple_one_for_one), and a gen_server-shaped server abstraction. Crashes are caught and restarted by a tree, not by your shell script.
  • You care about tail latency. xtc has resource accountants (xtc_res) with high-water alert callbacks so you can hold bounded RSS, file descriptors, in-flight tasks, and bandwidth under stress. Backpressure is built in; OOM-spirals are not.
  • You want portable source. The same source builds and passes its tests on Linux (glibc and musl), FreeBSD, illumos, and Windows. Linux is exercised on every commit by CI (gcc and clang, plus AddressSanitizer, UBSan, and the forced-fcontext substrate that musl uses), as are macOS (Apple Silicon, the kqueue backend + ucontext substrate, full C munit suite) and Windows/MSVC (xtc.lib + smoke test). FreeBSD 15 (clang, kqueue) was re-verified against the current tree (full gmake check passes, including the native kqueue file-AIO path). illumos (SunOS 5.11, UltraSPARC v9 / big-endian sparcv9, gcc, the event-ports backend) was re-verified against the current tree (full gmake check, with OpenSSL 3). Windows builds with all three of MinGW, Clang64, and MSVC. The IOCP runtime (AFD socket poll, cross-thread wakeup, file AIO) was runtime-verified on a Windows host with MinGW (loop/task/timer/waker/net + file-AIO); the per-commit Windows CI remains an MSVC xtc.lib + smoke build. macOS and AIX have OS-layer ports; AIX awaits a test host. See docs/M_WINDOWS_MATRIX.md, docs/M_LIBC_MATRIX.md, and PLAN.md for the per-platform status.
  • You want to stay close to the metal. No GC, no STW pauses. Memory comes from cache-line-padded slab caches with optional shared-memory mode (a BDB-style roff_t pointer-into-region works across processes). Small messages (payload up to 256 bytes) are served from a per-thread envelope pool, so the common send path takes no allocator round-trip; larger messages fall back to malloc. Reads on the read-mostly primitive (xtc_lrlock) are wait-free.

A 30-second taste

#include <xtc.h>
#include <xtc_loop.h>
#include <xtc_proc.h>
static void
worker(void *arg)
{
xtc_pid_t parent = *(xtc_pid_t *)arg;
xtc_send(parent, "hello", 5);
}
int
main(void)
{
xtc_loop_t *loop;
xtc_pid_t self, child;
void *msg; size_t sz;
xtc_loop_init(&loop);
self = xtc_self();
xtc_proc_spawn(loop, worker, &self, NULL, &child);
/* Wait for "hello" with a 1-second timeout. */
if (xtc_recv(&msg, &sz, 1000LL * 1000 * 1000) == XTC_OK) {
printf("got %zu bytes from worker\n", sz);
free(msg);
}
xtc_loop_run(loop);
xtc_loop_fini(loop);
return 0;
}
xtc_pid_t
Definition xtc_proc.h:33

Compile:

cc my.c -lxtc -lpthread -o my

That's a one-process actor system in 25 lines.

Where it shines

examples/05_rexis/ is a working Redis-protocol server in ~2,000 LOC. It uses every major xtc subsystem and stays inside hard --max-memory, --max-keys, --max-clients, --max-iops, and --cores caps under load. Run it with:

cd examples/05_rexis && make
./rexis-server-xtc -p 6379 --max-memory=$((100*1024*1024)) --max-clients=10000

Then talk to it with redis-cli like any Redis server.

Other examples in examples/:

Example What it shows
01_hello_async/ A single async task with a timer
02_proc_pingpong/ Two BEAM processes bouncing messages
03_supervised_app/ Crash a worker, watch the supervisor restart it
04_lockmgr_demo/ The 9-mode transactional lock manager
05_rexis/ Networked, budgeted, multi-command Redis-compat server

Built on three traditions

xtc owes a lot to three runtimes that came before:

  • Tokio (Rust) – the work-stealing executor model, futures, channels, and the principle that single-threaded primitives are faster than locks when you can get away with them.
  • The BEAM (Erlang/Elixir) – processes, mailboxes, selective receive, links, monitors, supervisors, and the philosophy that "let it crash" is a feature when the supervisor tree is well-designed.
  • Seastar (C++) – thread-per-core, share-nothing reactors, cache-line awareness, and the discipline that the runtime must not allocate on the hot path.

‍You either start with BEAM or you build it over the years in your stack and in your infra – as detailed in "You Built an Erlang": https://vereis.com/posts/you_built_an_erlang

Where these conflict, xtc picks the choice that's most idiomatic in C and explains why in PLAN.md. Read that file when you want to understand the why; read the man pages and headers when you want the what.

Status and stability

xtc is 1.0. The public API surface is stable and semver applies from here: no breaking change to a documented public API without a major version bump. The semver / deprecation policy is documented in docs/abi-stability.md.

What's working today:

Layer Status
L0 OS substrate Linux, FreeBSD, illumos runtime-verified; Windows (MinGW/Clang64/MSVC) and macOS OS-layer ports build; AIX builds, awaits a test host.
L1 I/O io_uring, epoll, kqueue, poll, select, and illumos event-ports (port_*) runtime-verified (the last on big-endian sparcv9, including its native SIGEV_PORT file-AIO path). IOCP (Windows) runtime-verified on a host with MinGW (loop/task/timer/wakeup/socket-poll/file-AIO); AIX pollset COMPILES and is code-reviewed but not yet runtime-verified. Per-commit CI runs Linux + macOS at runtime; Windows CI is a build-only smoke.
L2 event runtime Done. Single + multi-loop, work stealing, hand-written x86_64 fcontext (~7.6 ns/swap) + 7 more arches + ucontext fallback.
L3 primitives Done. Channels, processes, sync, RCU, lwlock, lrlock, lockmgr, slab, resource caps, observability.
L4 orchestration Done. Supervisors (4 strategies), gen_server, registry, app bringup, hierarchical mctx.
L5 PG adapter Designed (docs/M16_PG_ADAPTER.md); not yet implemented.
TLS OpenSSL, GnuTLS, wolfSSL, Mbed TLS, and BoringSSL backends build and pass the m18 suite in CI (docs/M_TLS_MATRIX.md); SChannel (Windows) is compile-only.

Test coverage today: 412 munit test cases + 23 hegel-c property tests on Linux (the munit total spans the L0-L5 suites plus the 35 OTP/gen_server cases), clean under AddressSanitizer and UBSan in CI. GitHub CI also runs the full C munit suite on macOS (Apple Silicon: kqueue + ucontext + GCD dispatch semaphores) and an MSVC xtc.lib + smoke build on Windows every commit. FreeBSD 15 (clang, kqueue) was re-verified against the current tree (full gmake check passes, including the native kqueue file-AIO path); the Windows IOCP runtime was runtime-verified on a host with MinGW. illumos (SunOS 5.11, UltraSPARC v9 / big-endian sparcv9, gcc) was also re-verified against the current tree (full gmake check, OpenSSL 3, native event-port file-AIO). None of FreeBSD/illumos/Windows-runtime is in per-commit CI yet. Windows also passes ~233 munit under MinGW and 48/48 of the buildable binaries under Clang64 in prior runs.

Honest gaps and known issues live in docs/KNOWN_ISSUES.md. The original design plan (a historical bring-up document) is in PLAN.md; it predates the implementation and does not track current status – the live status is this table plus KNOWN_ISSUES.

Building

xtc is BSD-style C11. No external deps beyond libc, pthreads, and optionally liburing/OpenSSL.

<!-- M0_CLAIMS:B1_BEGIN -->
cd dist && autoreconf -i && cd ..
mkdir -p build_unix && cd build_unix
../dist/configure # autodetects io backend + tls
make -j$(nproc)
<!-- M0_CLAIMS:B1_END -->
make check # full test suite
sudo make install # libxtc.a + headers + man pages
<!-- M0_CLAIMS:B2_BEGIN -->
meson setup build_meson
meson compile -C build_meson
<!-- M0_CLAIMS:B2_END -->
meson test -C build_meson

Configure flags worth knowing:

Flag What it does
--with-io-backend=AUTO Pick io_uring, epoll, kqueue, IOCP, poll, select; defaults are sensible per-OS

| --with-tls=openssl|none|auto | Build TLS support (OpenSSL only today) | | --with-liburing=PATH | Use a specific liburing install | | --with-hegel=PATH | Enable property-based tests via the hegel-c framework |

A meson build is also provided (meson.build), with the same options and behaviour.

Documentation

  • examples/ – start here. Five working programs from "hello async" to "Redis-compat server with budgets".
  • docs/getting-started.md – step-by-step beginner walkthrough, from "just cloned" to an async TCP server.
  • man/man3/ and man/man7/ – per-API reference. Every public xtc_* symbol has a man page (coverage is gate-enforced in make check).
  • PLAN.md – the full design rationale. Long but exhaustive.
  • docs/ARCHITECTURE.md – the layer diagram, the principles, the why.
  • docs/abi-stability.md – semver and deprecation policy.
  • docs/KNOWN_ISSUES.md – everything I know about that's not perfect.

License

ISC. See [LICENSE](LICENSE).

Contributing

Issues and patches welcome. Code style is BSD KNF as encoded in .clang-format. All contributions must be ASCII-only in source, docs, comments, and commit messages. Run dist/s_async and dist/s_cfg lints before submitting. Property-based tests (via hegel-c) are encouraged for any new primitive.

Inspiration