Some days ago I was mad enough to begin hacking on another project. I decided that it had to be serious (or somesuch), so settled on C for the language.

Now, having cobbled together quite a few small contraptions in Perl, I was amazed that the most widespread language lacks a resemblance of the mighty CPAN. In other words: there is no comprehensive repository of C modules each doing one thing.

There are certainly various libraries doing wonderful deeds, but:

• They are spread over the whole world. At least I don't know of a site where one can search for e.g. JPEG and see a number of source files/libraries offering JPEG (de)compression.

• They are a tad to unwieldy. In most cases, I don't care about a lib that has a million features. I just want, say, a function that sends a mail over SMTP.

I'm still wondering why CCAN does not exist, yet.

Robbe <robbe@orcus.priv.at>