Introduction to Abseil

Welcome to Abseil! Abseil is an open-source collection of C++ code (compliant to C++17) designed to augment the C++ standard library. This document introduces Abseil and provides an overview of the code we’re providing.

Table of Contents

Codemap

The Abseil codebase consists of the following C++ library components:

  • base Abseil Fundamentals
    The base library contains initialization code and other code which all other Abseil code depends on. Code within base may not depend on any other code (other than the C++ standard library).
  • algorithm
    The algorithm library contains additions to the C++ <algorithm> library and container-based versions of such algorithms.
  • container
    The container library contains additional STL-style containers.
  • debugging
    The debugging library contains code useful for enabling leak checks, and stacktrace and symbolization utilities.
  • hash
    The hash library contains the hashing framework and default hash functor implementations for hashable types in Abseil.
  • memory
    The memory library contains memory management facilities that augment C++’s <memory> library.
  • meta
    The meta library contains type checks similar to those available in the C++ <type_traits> library.
  • numeric
    The numeric library contains 128-bit integer types as well as implementations of C++20’s bitwise math functions.
  • strings
    The strings library contains a variety of strings routines and utilities.
  • synchronization
    The synchronization library contains concurrency primitives (Abseil’s absl::Mutex class, an alternative to std::mutex) and a variety of synchronization abstractions.
  • time
    The time library contains abstractions for computing with absolute points in time, durations of time, and formatting and parsing time within time zones.
  • types
    The types library contains non-container utility types.
  • utility
    The utility library contains utility and helper code.

License

The Abseil C++ library is licensed under the terms of the Apache license. See LICENSE for more information.

For more information about Abseil: