LibTools is a library of containers and other useful components written in C. It was designed and implemented by John Sloan while he was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. It was developed in 1992 through 1994. It was initially applied in a distributed spooling system called TAGS, for Text And Graphics System, hosted on multiprocessor Sun servers. LibTools has been used in other projects at NCAR since then.

LibTools is historically interesting because it uses design patterns that much later became the basis for tools such as the C++ Standard Template Library (STL) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML). LibTools also incorporates automated unit tests, long before processes like Extreme Programming (XP) made them popular.

A technical report describing this and related libraries can be found here .

LibTools is the intellectual property of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), Boulder, Colorado. UCAR licenses LibTools for free for non-commercial purposes. A license agreement is included in the compressed tar ball, which can be found here.