Trying Out MUSL

MUSL is a C standart library installation. It is an alternative to prominent glibc implementation. I have taken glibc for granted throughout my programming journey until Alpine Linux has brought it my attention.

MUSL can be installed via following simple installation steps.

git clone git://git.musl-libc.org/musl
cd musl
./configure
make

MUSL-GCC is under

/usr/local/musl/bin

Add this folder to your path. We can now use musl-gcc to compile our C projects with MUSL C implementation.

How Does It Fare?

I tried the library on several simple source files and compared the sizes of generated binaries.

File 1: Simple Dynamic Loading

[embed]

gcc -ldl example_rtld.c -o glibc_output
musl-gcc example_rtld.c -o musl_output

File 2: Linux File Locking

[embed]

gcc flock_test.c -o glibc_output
musl-gcc flock_test.c -o musl_output

File 3: A Pretty Ancient Grep Implementation

This link contains a fairly old grep implementation. Let’s see how well each of them do.

gcc grep.c -o glibc_output
musl-gcc grep.c -o musl_output

Do We Really Link to MUSL?

Let us check out ELF headers

readelf --header musl_output | grep INTERP -A 2

Use ld list to list dependencies

Thanks for reading.