As I got more into C programming, I started looking for data structure libraries. Found a few [0]. Also evaluated sc, but it had too much pre-processor magic for my taste. It also bundles random "stuff" like a URI parser, a thread abstraction, etc.
Eventually I rolled my own [1] more focused library. It's basic and portable.
I think it's common for C programmers to roll their own. I did the same [0].
I went pretty deep into composable C templates to build mine so it's more powerful than most. The containers can handle non-bitwise-movable types with full C++-style lifecycle functions and such, and the sort algorithms can handle dynamic and non-contiguous arrays (they are powerful enough to implement qsort() [1], which is more than I can say for any other C sort templates I've seen.) My reasoning for the complexity at the time was that any powerful container library is going to be reasonably complex in implementation (as anyone who's looked at STL source code knows), so it just needs to be encapsulated behind a good interface.
I'm not so sure that's true anymore. These sorts of simpler libraries like the one linked here definitely seem to be more popular among C programmers. I think if people are using C, it's not just the C++ language complexity they want to get away from, but also the implementation complexity of libraries and such. There's a balance to be had for sure, and I think the balance varies from person to person, which is why no library has emerged as the de facto standard for containers in C.
I decided that I wanted to be able to simply drop a single .h file and a single .c file into any project without have to build a `libBlah.so` and link it to every project that needed (for example) a hashmap.
The practical result is that using the hashmap only requires me to copy the header and source files into the calling project.
It does build as a standalone library too, so you can link it if you want.
My primary reason for starting this is that I was pretty unsatisfied with all of the string libraries for C. When all I want to do is concatenate multiple strings together, I don't want to have to convert between `char *` and `struct stringtype *` everywhere.
The string functions are very useful as they all operate on the standard `char *` (nul-terminated) type.
Eventually I rolled my own [1] more focused library. It's basic and portable.
0: https://begriffs.com/posts/2020-08-31-portable-stable-softwa... 1: https://github.com/begriffs/libderp