What is the history of uClibc? Where did it come from?
uClibc started off as a fork on the Linux-8086 C library, which is part of the elks project. The Linux-8086 C library was, apparently, largely written from scratch but also borrowed code from libc4, glibc, some Atari library code, with bits and pieces from about 20 other places. I had for some time been despairing over the state of C libraries in Linux. GNU libc, the standard, is very poorly suited to embedded systems and has been getting bigger with every release. I spent quite a bit of time looking over the available Open Source C libraries that I knew of, and none of them really impressed me. I felt there was a real vacancy in the embedded Linux ecology. The closest library to what I imagined an embedded C library should be was uClibc. But it had a lot of problems too — not the least of which was that, traditionally, uClibc required a complete source tree fork in order to support each and every new platform. This resulted in a big mess of twisty versions, all different.
