refcount/README.md

# RefCount

RefCount is a reference counting (thus the name) and garbage collection library
written in C.

RefCount has support for
 - Breaking dependency chains via garbage collection
 - Multiple distinct contexts allowing the tracking of many types of objects,
   each with a possibly different memory allocation implementation
 - Safely running in multi-threaded environments
 - Destructors that can possibly re-reference an object to save it

### Building

The only external requirement is [ht](https://git.zander.im/Zander671/ht). If
you build using the instructions below, CMake will automatically download and
build the dependency for you.

For multi threading support, you need a C11 compiler that supports atomic types
and has the `<threads.h>` header. Without threading support, you only need a C99
compiler.

You can build using:
```sh
cmake -B build .
# replace with above with
# cmake -B build -DREFCOUNT_USE_THREADS=OFF
# to build without threads (change the "OFF" to "ON" to re-enable threads)
make -C build
```

You can then run tests using:
```sh
make -C build test
```

### Documentation

You can generate documentation with:
```
doxygen
```

You can look in the `test/` directory for some examples of the various features
of RefCount in use.