Libconfig is a simple library for processing structured configuration files, like this one: test.cfg. This file format is more compact and more readable than XML. And unlike XML, it is type-aware, so it is not necessary to do string parsing in application code.

Libconfig is very compact — just 38K for the stripped C shared library (less than one-fourth the size of the expat XML parser library) and 66K for the stripped C++ shared library. This makes it well-suited for memory-constrained systems like handheld devices.

The library includes bindings for both the C and C++ languages. It works on POSIX-compliant UNIX systems (GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD) and Windows (2000, XP and later).