The standard base libraries provides a vendor-neutral (or Unix/Linux-like) C programming interface to base functionality provided by such commonly used libraries as glib, openssl, and so on. These libraries:

• enable a faster application development in Symbian OS via familiar standard interfaces and programming model
• reduce the porting effort of existing components to Symbian OS mobile phones
• reduce the effort to have a common code base for multiple platforms

Open C provides the following libraries:

• libc- Standard C libraries. There are several 'libraries' or groups of functions included inside libc: the standard I/O routines, database routines, bit operators, string operators, character tests and character operators, DES encryption routines, storage allocation, time functions, signal handling, and more.
• libm- Arithmetical and mathematical functions operating according to the standard C.
• libpthread- The pthreads API provides an IEEE Std1003.1c (POSIX) standard interface for implementing multiple threads of execution within a traditional developer process. This implementation is currently user-space only. pthreads provide functions for the following:
  • thread creation and destruction
  • an interface to the thread scheduler to establish thread scheduling parameters
  • mutex and condition variables to provide mechanisms for the programmer to synchronize access to shared process resources
• libdl- Loading of dynamic link libraries.
• libz- The 'zlib' compression library provides in-memory compression and decompression functions, including integrity checks of the uncompressed data.
• libcrypto- The OpenSSL crypto library implements a wide range of cryptographic algorithms used in various Internet standards. The services provided by this library are used by the OpenSSL implementations of SSL, TLS, and S/MIME, and they have also been used to implement SSH, OpenPGP, and other cryptographic standards.
• libssl- The OpenSSL ssl library implements the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols.
• libcrypt- Cryptography libraries containing functions for encrypting blocks of data, messages, and password hashing.
• libglib- A general-purpose utility library, which provides many useful data types, macros, type conversions, string utilities, file utilities, a main loop abstraction, and so on. It works on many UNIX-like platforms, Windows, OS/2, and BeOS.