*** What is this?

libheapfile is exactly what it sounds like.  It's a file to store small- to
medium-sized objects to disk.  Unlike your typical heap file, however, this
one has an index on the key you provide when you store your items so lookups
are a bit more snappy than sifting through the entire file.  There's an
implicit free-list-style implementation for allocating new records so that
deletes don't just leave gaps in your heap file.  However, this implementation
can still suffer from external fragmentation depending on your usage paterns.
Access into the file is done via mmap.

*** Where does it work?

Thus far, this has been developed for OS X.  It was compiled with Apple's
g++ 4.2.1.  There's no crazy C++ here, so I imagine this will easily port
to some other POSIX platform with a little work on the system calls.
The heap file metadata storage and access is endian agnostic, so you could
write a heap file on a little endian box and it should read just fine
on a big endian box (and vice versa).

*** Build instructions.

Here's how to build it...you should probably use gnu make.

$ make       // builds lib/libheapfile.a
$ make test  // builds test_heapfile executable
$ make check // runs the unit tets in test_heapfile

To start using it, take a look at include/heap_file.h for the interface
and src/heap_file.t.cpp for the a quick Hello-World-style example on
how to use it.

*** License

This is released under the MIT license.