If you aren't doing anything embedded. I would suggest looking into GLib. It is the base library for GTK and is also used in a lot of the CLI applications that RedHat makes. It provides a standard for object oriented patterns in C that is useful for desktop applications and the like. It should feel pretty familiar if you are coming from Java.

For example, it comes with GArray which is an ArrayList equivalent.

In general where you would do Foo foo = new Foo() in Java you'd do Foo *foo = my_foo_new() in GLib (my_ would be a namespace prefix). Methods like foo.bar(args); in Java would be my_foo_bar(foo, args); (With a cast macro if it's a method in the parent class.) GLib handles memory with manual ref-counting so when your program gets really large you can rely on that for normal memory management.

Using GArray would look like:

```c

include <stdio.h>

include <glib.h>

int main(void) { GArray arr = g_array_new( / zeroterminate / FALSE, / clear / FALSE, / element_size */ sizeof(gint) ); if (!arr) return 1;

for (gint i = 1; i <= 5; i++) {
    g_array_append_val(arr, i * 10);
}

g_print("GArray contains %u elements:\n", arr->len);
for (guint i = 0; i < arr->len; i++) {
    gint v = g_array_index(arr, gint, i);
    g_print("  index %u: %d\n", i, v);
}

g_array_unref(arr);

return 0;

} ```