firefox/nsprpub

NSPR — Netscape Portable Runtime

Warning

NSPR is a legacy library (started in 1994!) and should not be used for new projects. It predates modern C/C++ standards and the portable threading, I/O, time, and networking primitives now available in the standard library and the operating system. New code should rely on those instead (e.g. <threads.h> / std::thread, <chrono>, POSIX/Winsock APIs). NSPR is maintained primarily for the benefit of existing consumers such as NSS and Firefox.

NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime) is a platform-neutral API that provides system-level and libc-like functions. It gives applications a uniform interface to non-GUI operating system facilities and is used by Mozilla clients, Red Hat and Oracle server applications, and other software.

NSPR is functionally complete and is in maintenance mode: updates track changes in supported operating systems rather than adding new features.

Features

• Threads — a unified threading API across platforms ranging from those without native threads to those with sophisticated implementations.
• Thread synchronization — monitor-style mutual exclusion and condition variables, with Java-compatible reentrancy.
• I/O — an enhanced BSD-sockets model supporting layered, synchronous I/O with optional non-blocking behavior.
• Network addresses — manipulation of network addresses with a migration path between IPv4 and IPv6.
• Time — interval timers for timeouts and scheduling, plus calendar functions covering roughly year −30000 to year 30000.
• Memory management — malloc, calloc, realloc, free.
• Shared library linking — load and unload dynamic libraries.

Getting NSPR

• Windows — build from source.
• macOS — install via MacPorts or Homebrew.
• Debian / Ubuntu — sudo apt-get install libnspr4-dev
• openSUSE — install mozilla-nspr (and mozilla-nspr-devel for headers) via zypper or YaST.

Building from source

mkdir target && cd target
../configure
make

Running the test suite

make -C target/pr/tests
cd target/pr/tests && ./runtests.sh

Related projects

• NSS — Network Security Services, built on top of NSPR.

License

NSPR is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0. See LICENSE for details.