microsoft/GSL

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

6710 stars · 772 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Microsoft's implementation of the Guidelines Support Library (GSL), a header-only C++14 library of types and functions recommended by the C++ Core Guidelines. It provides safety-oriented utilities such as not_null pointers, bounds-checked span views, and zstring types.

Use cases

• enforce non-null pointer guarantees in C++ code
• get bounds-checked views over contiguous memory
• adopt C++ Core Guidelines types in my project
• replace raw pointers with safer alternatives
• add span-like containers to a C++14 codebase

When to choose

• you follow the C++ Core Guidelines and want their recommended types
• you need a lightweight, header-only safety library with no dependencies
• you want bounds-checked spans on pre-C++20 compilers

When to avoid

• you only target C++20+ and can rely on std::span and std::not_null alternatives
• you need a large general-purpose utility library like Boost
• your project cannot use the Microsoft license terms

Facets

library · maturity stable

developer-tools type-system error-handling developer-tools programming-languages cpp cross-platform cpp-core-guidelines header-only span not-null bounds-safety algorithms

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