picolibc/picolibc

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1625 stars · 292 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

Picolibc is a standard C library (libc and libm) targeting small embedded 32- and 64-bit systems with limited RAM and ROM, formed by blending code from Newlib and AVR Libc. It supports many architectures including ARM, RISC-V, MIPS, and Xtensa, and uses permissive BSD-like licenses.

Use cases

• standard C library for embedded firmware
• printf and math support on microcontrollers
• C library for RISC-V bare-metal development
• C library for ARM Cortex-M projects
• small footprint libc for limited RAM devices
• libc for Zephyr or ESP32 builds

When to choose

• building firmware for resource-constrained embedded systems
• you need standard C APIs on bare-metal targets
• you want a permissively licensed libc without GPL bits
• targeting ARM, RISC-V, or other supported embedded architectures

When to avoid

• developing desktop or server applications on full operating systems
• you need a fully POSIX-compliant libc like glibc or musl
• your target architecture is not supported

Facets

library · maturity active

embedded embedded-systems developer-tools embedded cross-platform windows c-library libc libm newlib embedded-systems risc-v arm iot linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

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