A single-file C library to abstract away the annoyances of IOKit and IOUSB.
For a number of years, I've copied and pasted snippets of code (that have now evolved into this library) between projects of mine. After doing this enough times, I wanted to finally put something proper together.
That said, this library is far from feature-complete and only really contains abstractions for the things I've needed to do. However, hopefully it can still be useful for you.
Foremost, this library is intended to be simple and easy to use. However, a few other things that were in mind when designing this library were:
- keeping the code freestanding, so that this library may be easily dropped into a project and forgotten;
- providing a pure C API, for maximum portability and so that bindings to other languages may be easily written at a later time; and
- returning ("bubbling-up") actual IOKit return codes wherever possible, as to not obscure what went wrong if a function fails.
The example applications exist to illustrate how the library is used (and also to catch breaking changes). Most of the API should be pretty obvious, but I've tried to document the less-obvious parts in the header.
This library has been designed so that you can simply drop the two source files into your own project; you'll just need to link against Foundation and IOKit.
However, you may also build it using CMake if you want to add it as a submodule or install it to your system.
Copyright © 2022-2025 Jon Palmisciano. All rights reserved.
Licensed under the BSD 3-Clause license; the full terms of the license can be found in LICENSE.txt.