Company
Date Published
Author
Jens Alfke, Mobile Architect, Couchbase
Word count
687
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Couchbase Lite for C, introduced with the Couchbase Lite 3.0 release, extends the client-side document-database library’s capabilities to C and C++ applications through an ANSI C API, offering a single small native library with no language runtime dependencies and broad OS compatibility. It targets data-rich IoT devices running Linux, as well as non-embedded Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Debian, and supports macOS and Windows, making it an attractive option for lightweight servers and cross-platform apps. Although Couchbase Lite for C is not intended to match the scalability of Couchbase Server, it provides a JSON-document data model with a small footprint and zero configuration. The library's cross-platform API benefits applications with C/C++ core code and, through foreign function interfaces, can potentially be accessed by various programming languages. Couchbase has provided sample Python and Rust bindings to facilitate community-driven development of additional language bindings.