These APIs include such foundational facilities as open, read, write, malloc, printf, getaddrinfo, dlopen, pthread_create, crypt, login, exit and more.

The glibc project was initially written mostly by Roland McGrath, working for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in the summer of 1987 as a teenager.

[17] In July 2017, 30 years after he started glibc, Roland McGrath announced his departure, "declaring myself maintainer emeritus and withdrawing from direct involvement in the project.

[21] glibc 2.0 also had better internationalisation and more in-depth translation, IPv6 capability, 64-bit data access, facilities for multithreaded applications, future version compatibility, and the code was more portable.

The steering committee installation was surrounded by a public controversy, as it was openly described by Ulrich Drepper as a failed hostile takeover maneuver by Richard Stallman.

[32][33][34][35] In March 2012, the steering committee voted to disband itself and remove Drepper in favor of a community-driven development process, with Ryan Arnold, Maxim Kuvyrkov, Joseph Myers, Carlos O'Donell, and Alexandre Oliva holding the responsibility of GNU maintainership (but no extra decision-making power).

Its most common use is in systems using the Linux kernel on x86 hardware, however, officially supported hardware[39] includes: ARM, ARC, C-SKY, DEC Alpha, IA-64, Motorola m68k, MicroBlaze, MIPS, Nios II, PA-RISC, PowerPC, RISC-V, s390, SPARC, and x86 (old versions support TILE).

[41] glibc has been criticized as being "bloated" and slower than other libraries in the past, e.g. by Linus Torvalds[42] and embedded Linux programmers.

However, many small-device projects use GNU libc over the smaller alternatives because of its application support, standards compliance, and completeness.

[47] There are compatibility layers ("shims") to allow programs written for other ecosystems to run on glibc interface offering systems.