C Interface Documentation

Caution

The CLib API is an experimental part of Cantera and may be changed without notice.

Cantera has two C interfaces (CLib):

• The Generated CLib API.

• The legacy CLib is hand-coded and is not feature-complete.

Both C interfaces consists of a set of libraries that are designed to encapsulate Cantera functionality and to make it available for use in languages and applications other than C++. Each library provides functions that are declared extern "C". All Cantera objects are stored and referenced by integers - no pointers are passed to or from the calling application.

Generated C Interface

Added in version 3.2: Replaces the legacy C interface starting in Cantera 3.2.

The generated CLib is fully documented in Doxygen and is installed by default.

While the generated CLib is not feature-complete compared to the C++ API, it re-implements all features of the legacy CLib and is easily extensible. See Generated CLib API for further information.

Legacy C Interface

Deprecated since version 3.2: The legacy CLib is superseded by the generated CLib and will be removed in Cantera 3.3.

The (undocumented) legacy CLib is available when Cantera is built with the clib_legacy=y option:

scons build clib_legacy=y