Good Bioinformatics Library In C Similar To Biopython?

Question

[Tianyang Li]

Hi,

There's a previous question about bioinformatics libraries in C/C++. Most of the answers were C++ libraries.

I'd like to do some lightweight development using C instead of C++, which I think is a bit too complicated (especially when it comes to good memory management).

Are there any good suggestions? Thanks.

[Gww]

I disagree that C++ is more complicated for memory management. They have all of the STL data structures plus destructors are automatically called when an object passes out of scope. With C you have to remember to free everything you allocate yourself.

[Sean Davis]

I think you'll find that general purpose bioinformatics libraries in C are hard to come by. If you know, specifically, what you want to do, that might help folks answer better.

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

related: http://biostar.stackexchange.com/questions/1516

[Michael Schubert]

Why not choose a high level language then?

Answer 1

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

See the :

• NCBI C toolkit ncbi.tar.gz
• jkent's sources at UCSC: http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/admin/

I'd like to do some lightweight development using C instead of C+++, which I think is a bit too complicated

makes no sense to me.

Answer 2

[Yu]

Jim Kent's source code, which is the core for UCSC genome database and browser. http://genome.ucsc.edu/ http://genome.ucsc.edu/admin/git.html