# GLib Overview

GLib is a general-purpose utility library, which provides many useful data types, macros, type conversions, string utilities, file utilities, a mainloop abstraction, and so on. It works on many UNIX-like platforms, Windows, OS/2 and BeOS. GLib is released under the GNU Library General Public License (GNU LGPL).

The general policy of GLib is that all functions are invisibly threadsafe with the exception of data structure manipulation functions, where, if you have two threads manipulating the same data structure, they must use a lock to synchronize their operation.