How was newlib supposed to have been used?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 10:36 +0000, Luke A. Guest wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've just a conversation with a guy on #osdev who stated that newlib was
> intended to run on an OS. From what I've gathered from the docs I was
> under the impression it was meant for bare hardware development.
> 
> Which is it?

Neither, nor and all of it.

newlib is a libc implementation. 

I.e. it is a library providing a standardized API to resources
underneath, which applications might want to use at run-time, and which
toolchains (compiler/linker etc.) will want to know about.

What these resources actually are is secondary. They can be
"bare-metal", a full fledged kernel or other libraries.
Newlib can be and is being used in all of these situations. 

Ralf