PICA library

The PICA library was created by Carlos Calafate and extended by Valentina Gaggero in order to provide a multi-platform intuitive API for communication protocols' designers. The objective was to accelerate the prototyping phase to provide users with a stable solution whose source code can compile directly on distinct platforms. However, PICA is very flexible, allowing users to choose whether to use PICA's or platform's features. The PICA architecture tries to be efficient in terms of code size and speed, making the differences in performance when compared to a customized solution minimal. The PICA library was developed in ANSI C language, and is available as dynamic-link library (.dll) file for Windows operating systems, and as a shared-object (.so) file for Linux-based operating systems.