google/nsync

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1280 stars · 90 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

nsync is a portable C library exporting synchronization primitives such as mutexes, reader-writer locks, condition variables, run-once initialization, waitable counters, and waitable bits. It offers conditional critical sections and cancellable waits as alternatives to pthread primitives, with small memory footprints and broad platform support.

Use cases

• replace pthread mutexes with more efficient reader-writer locks
• implement cancellable waits in multithreaded C code
• use conditional critical sections instead of condition variable while-loops
• synchronize threads in a portable C library across Unix and Windows
• implement barriers with waitable counters
• run-once lazy initialization in C

When to choose

• you need lightweight, portable synchronization primitives in C or C++
• you want cancellable waits without cancelling whole threads
• you need reader-writer locks as fast as mutexes
• you must compile with only a C90 compiler

When to avoid

• your project already works fine with pthreads or C++ standard library primitives
• you need a class-based C++ synchronization API
• you want a widely familiar API for team onboarding

Facets

library · maturity active

concurrency developer-tools performance windows cpp c cross-platform synchronization-primitives mutexes condition-variables reader-writer-locks c90-portable cancellation algorithms linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="google/nsync")