What is "musl"

musl is a C standard library intended for operating systems based on the Linux kernel, released under the MIT License. It was developed by Rich Felker with the goal to write a clean, efficient and standards-conformant libc implementation. It is designed from scratch to allow efficient static linking and to have realtime-quality robustness by avoiding races, internal failures on resource exhaustion and various other bad worst-case behaviours present in existing implementations. The dynamic runtime is a single file with stable ABI allowing race-free updates and the static linking support allows an application to be deployed as a single portable binary without significant size overhead.

It claims compatibility with the POSIX 2008 specification and the C11 standard. It also implements most of the widely used non-standard Linux, BSD, and glibc functions.

, Linux distributions that use musl as the standard C library include Alpine Linux, Dragora 3, OpenWRT, Sabotage, Morpheus Linux and optionally prebuilt for Void Linux.