Open-source c software
938 open-source libraries, tools and applications tagged c, ranked by how closely c is their primary purpose, then by adoption and maintenance health. Each entry links to a page with sources, use cases and when to choose or avoid it.
938 products, primary matches first, then adoption-weighted; health v2 shown.
| Product | Health v2 | Stars | Maturity |
|---|---|---|---|
| torvalds/linux The official source tree of the Linux kernel, the core of Linux operating systems that manages hardware, system resources, and fundamental … | 77 | 251470 | stable |
| nothings/stb A collection of single-file, public domain (or MIT) C/C++ libraries covering image loading/writing/resizing, TrueType font rasterization, O… | 71 | 34694 | stable |
| karpathy/llm.c llm.c is a pure C/CUDA implementation for training large language models like GPT-2 and GPT-3, with no dependency on PyTorch or Python. It … | 34 | 31176 | active |
| openssl/openssl OpenSSL is a robust, commercial‑grade cryptographic toolkit written in C. It provides a full‑featured implementation of TLS/SSL, DTLS, QUIC… | 99 | 30985 | active |
| facebook/zstd Zstandard (zstd) is a fast lossless compression algorithm and its reference C library, offering zlib-level or better compression ratios at … | 67 | 28018 | stable |
| mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse A C# implementation of the Wave Function Collapse algorithm that generates bitmaps and tilemaps locally similar to a single example input, … | 52 | 25341 | stable |
| LVGL LVGL (Light and Versatile Graphics Library) is a free, MIT-licensed open-source embedded UI library written in C for building graphical use… | 90 | 24981 | stable |
| Unleashed Firmware Unleashed Firmware is an unofficial custom firmware (CFW) for the Flipper Zero multitool device, written in C. It extends the stock firmwar… | 94 | 22491 | active |
| qmk/qmk_firmware QMK (Quantum Mechanical Keyboard) is open-source firmware for custom keyboards and other input devices, supporting Atmel AVR and ARM USB mi… | 75 | 20731 | stable |
| iSH iSH is an iOS/iPadOS app that runs a Linux shell locally using a usermode x86 emulator and syscall translation. It ships an Alpine Linux en… | 86 | 20592 | active |
| karpathy/llama2.c A minimal, dependency-free implementation of the Llama 2 LLM architecture that trains in PyTorch and runs inference in a single ~700-line p… | 29 | 20192 | active |
| nicbarker/clay Clay is a high-performance 2D UI layout library in C, distributed as a single zero-dependency header file. It provides a flex-box-like decl… | 51 | 18159 | active |
| NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules The source release of NVIDIA's open Linux GPU kernel modules, released per driver version and built with make. It must be paired with match… | 93 | 17411 | active |
| BlurHash BlurHash is a compact algorithm and multi-language library that encodes an image into a short 20-30 character string representing a blurred… | 32 | 17077 | stable |
| skywind3000/kcp KCP is a fast and reliable ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest) protocol implemented as a pure algorithm in C, consisting of just two source file… | 83 | 16920 | stable |
| systemd/systemd systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system, providing a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts the re… | 96 | 16851 | stable |
| flipperdevices/flipperzero-firmware The official open-source firmware for the Flipper Zero, a portable multi-tool device for interacting with access control systems. It implem… | 79 | 16718 | active |
| Zephyr RTOS Zephyr is a scalable, secure, real-time operating system (RTOS) designed for resource-constrained embedded devices across multiple hardware… | 91 | 16683 | stable |
| Dummy Robot Dummy-Robot is a complete open-source design for a super-compact smart robotic arm, including 3D/CAD mechanical models, PCB hardware design… | 32 | 15569 | active |
| OpenCore OpenCore is a UEFI bootloader for booting macOS (Hackintosh) and other operating systems on PC hardware, with an accompanying UEFI developm… | 89 | 15505 | active |
| ggml-org/ggml ggml is a plain C/C++ tensor library for machine learning with no dependencies, designed to be simple, portable, and efficient. It supports… | 99 | 15480 | stable |
| webview A tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++ that lets developers build modern desktop GUIs using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. It abstrac… | 61 | 14263 | active |
| Assimp Open Asset Import Library (Assimp) is a C/C++ library that imports 40+ 3D model file formats (FBX, glTF, Collada, OBJ, STL, and more) into … | 90 | 13250 | stable |
| DaveGamble/cJSON cJSON is an ultralightweight JSON parser and serializer written in ANSI C, distributed as a single C file and header. It provides simple pa… | 66 | 13026 | stable |
| OpenZFS OpenZFS is an advanced copy-on-write file system and volume manager originally developed for Solaris, now maintained by the OpenZFS communi… | 97 | 12492 | stable |
| RT-Thread/rt-thread RT-Thread is an open-source, community-based real-time operating system (RTOS) for IoT and embedded devices, written primarily in C. It com… | 90 | 12286 | stable |
| lz4/lz4 LZ4 is a lossless compression algorithm and C library focused on extremely fast compression and decompression speeds, with a high-compressi… | 68 | 12164 | stable |
| Klipper3d/klipper Klipper is open-source firmware for 3D printers that combines a general-purpose computer (like a Raspberry Pi) with one or more micro-contr… | 77 | 11977 | stable |
| Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear Nuklear is a minimal-state, immediate-mode graphical user interface toolkit written in ANSI C (C89) and distributed as a single-header libr… | 85 | 11453 | stable |
| Cyan4973/xxHash xxHash is an extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm library written in C, offering XXH32, XXH64, and the modern XXH3 family (64- a… | 86 | 11312 | stable |
| jemalloc/jemalloc jemalloc is a general-purpose malloc(3) memory allocator implementation emphasizing fragmentation avoidance and scalable concurrency suppor… | 89 | 11241 | stable |
| microsoft/STL Microsoft's official open-source implementation of the C++ Standard Library (STL) that ships with the MSVC toolset and Visual Studio. The r… | 83 | 11153 | active |
| sqlite/sqlite The official Git mirror of the SQLite source tree, containing the complete source code for the SQLite embedded SQL database engine. SQLite … | 77 | 10740 | stable |
| libgit2 libgit2 is a portable, pure C implementation of Git's core methods provided as a re-entrant linkable library with a solid API. It can be em… | 96 | 10629 | stable |
| erincatto/box2d Box2D is a widely used open-source 2D rigid body physics engine for games, written in portable C17 with a data-oriented design, multithread… | 74 | 10413 | stable |
| lua/lua The official development repository of Lua, a powerful, lightweight, embeddable scripting language implemented in C. It includes the langua… | 85 | 10388 | stable |
| Tencent/xLua xLua is a Lua scripting solution for C# environments such as Unity, .Net, and Mono, enabling Lua code to interoperate with C# in both direc… | 43 | 10202 | stable |
| macfuse/macfuse macFUSE is a macOS software package that lets non-privileged users create file systems in user space, with a kernel extension bridging to k… | 94 | 9845 | active |
| FastDFS FastDFS is an open-source high-performance distributed file system written in C, providing file storing, syncing, uploading, and downloadin… | 94 | 9260 | stable |
| FareedKhan-dev/kimi-k3-in-c A dependency-free C99 inference engine that runs the 2.78-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model on a single CPU with as little as 8 GB of RAM by… | 79 | 9033 | active |
| winfsp/winfsp WinFsp is a Windows platform providing a kernel-mode file system driver and user-mode DLL that lets developers implement custom file system… | 66 | 8934 | stable |
| aeron-io/aeron Aeron is an efficient, reliable message transport supporting UDP unicast, UDP multicast, and IPC, with Java, C, and C++ clients. It include… | 98 | 8915 | stable |
| Senparc.Weixin .NET SDK Senparc.Weixin is a comprehensive C# SDK for all WeChat platforms, covering Official Accounts, Mini Programs, Mini Games, WeChat Pay, WeCom… | 96 | 8906 | active |
| SanderMertens/flecs Flecs is a fast, lightweight Entity Component System (ECS) framework for C99 and C++17 that enables building games and simulations with mil… | 90 | 8755 | stable |
| Tencent/libco libco is a C/C++ coroutine library widely used in WeChat's back-end services since 2013, running on tens of thousands of machines. It trans… | 23 | 8692 | stable |
| zeux/meshoptimizer A C/C++ library providing algorithms to optimize triangle meshes for GPU rendering, including vertex cache optimization, overdraw reduction… | 94 | 8518 | stable |
| Ralim/IronOS IronOS is open-source replacement firmware for portable soldering irons such as the Miniware TS100/TS80/TS101, Pinecil, and Sequre models. … | 65 | 8368 | stable |
| libimobiledevice/libimobiledevice A cross-platform C library that implements Apple's native protocols for communicating with iOS devices over USB and Wi-Fi, without requirin… | 59 | 8273 | stable |
| Wren Wren is a small, fast, class-based concurrent scripting language implemented as an embeddable C library with a bytecode VM and lightweight … | 43 | 8141 | stable |
| Qiskit Qiskit is an open-source SDK for programming quantum computers at the level of quantum circuits, operators, and primitives (Sampler and Est… | 100 | 7908 | stable |
| leejet/stable-diffusion.cpp A pure C/C++ inference engine for diffusion models (Stable Diffusion, FLUX, Wan, Qwen Image, Z-Image, and more) built on ggml in the style … | 92 | 7734 | active |
| Entitas Entitas is a fast Entity Component System (ECS) framework built specifically for C# and Unity, optimized for garbage-collected environments… | 23 | 7677 | stable |
| ithewei/libhv libhv is a cross-platform C/C++ network library providing an event loop with non-blocking IO and timers, similar to libevent/libuv but with… | 69 | 7563 | active |
| phoboslab/qoi QOI is the 'Quite OK Image Format', a fast, lossless image compression format with a single-file MIT-licensed C/C++ reference implementatio… | 66 | 7529 | stable |
| SQLCipher SQLCipher is an open-source fork of SQLite that adds full-database 256-bit AES encryption, tamper detection, and strong key derivation. It … | 91 | 7286 | stable |
| stanfordnlp/GloVe Stanford's C implementation of the GloVe model for training distributed word representations (word embeddings), plus downloadable pre-train… | 34 | 7230 | stable |
| hathach/tinyusb TinyUSB is an open-source, cross-platform USB Host and Device stack for embedded systems written in C. It is designed for memory safety (no… | 83 | 7222 | stable |
| madler/zlib zlib is a general-purpose, patent-free data compression library written in C, implementing the zlib, deflate (RFC 1951), and gzip (RFC 1952… | 74 | 7159 | stable |
| littlefs-project/littlefs littlefs is a small fail-safe filesystem library written in C, designed for microcontrollers and flash storage. It provides power-loss resi… | 84 | 6973 | stable |
| bilibili/ijkplayer ijkplayer is a video player library for Android and iOS built on FFmpeg (ffplay), offering a MediaPlayer-like API with hardware decoding vi… | 32 | 33210 | maintenance |
| Mbed TLS Mbed TLS is a portable C library implementing TLS, DTLS, and X.509 certificate handling, plus a reference implementation of the PSA Cryptog… | 92 | 6963 | stable |
| rxi/microui microui is a tiny, portable immediate-mode UI library written in around 1100 sloc of ANSI C. It works within a fixed-size memory region and… | 32 | 6856 | stable |
| hiredis Hiredis is a minimalistic C client library for Redis, supporting the binary-safe RESP protocol for Redis >= 1.2. It provides synchronous, a… | 94 | 6688 | stable |
| peng-zhihui/HelloWord-Keyboard An open-source modular smart mechanical keyboard project (Hanwen/HelloWord) including full hardware design files (10 PCBs, enclosures, 3D m… | 32 | 6663 | active |
| H3 H3 is a hexagonal hierarchical geospatial indexing system developed at Uber, implemented as a C core library with bindings for many languag… | 83 | 6594 | stable |
| erincatto/box3d Box3D is a 3D rigid body physics engine for games, written in portable C17 with a data-oriented design. It provides collision detection, jo… | 65 | 6587 | active |
| PufferLib PufferLib is a fast, open-source reinforcement learning library that trains tiny, super-human models in seconds, achieving 1M+ environment … | 87 | 6476 | active |
| BLAKE3 The official Rust and C implementations of the BLAKE3 cryptographic hash function, which is faster than MD5, SHA-2, and BLAKE2 while remain… | 96 | 6468 | stable |
| microsoft/Detours Microsoft Detours is a C++ library for intercepting, monitoring, and instrumenting Win32 API calls on Windows via function hooking and bina… | 64 | 6384 | stable |
| TianoCore EDK II EDK II is TianoCore's open-source, cross-platform firmware development environment implementing the UEFI and PI specifications. It provides… | 88 | 6349 | active |
| Tencent/puerts PuerTS is a multi-language scripting solution from Tencent that embeds JavaScript/TypeScript (and, for Unity, Lua and Python) runtimes into… | 92 | 6217 | active |
| StackExchange/StackExchange.Redis StackExchange.Redis is a high-performance .NET client library for communicating with Redis and Redis-compatible servers (Valkey, Garnet, El… | 97 | 6203 | active |
| bellard/mquickjs MicroQuickJS is a compact JavaScript engine written in C, derived from QuickJS, designed for embedded systems with as little as 10 kB of RA… | 60 | 6193 | active |
| libusb/libusb libusb is a C library providing generic, user-mode access to USB devices across Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and BSD platforms. It suppo… | 80 | 6173 | stable |
| ldcsaa/HP-Socket HP-Socket is a high-performance network communication component library for C/C++ providing TCP, UDP, HTTP/HTTPS, and WebSocket server, cli… | 86 | 6151 | active |
| Dokany Dokany is a user-mode file system library for Windows, similar to FUSE on Linux, letting developers create file systems without writing ker… | 59 | 5954 | active |
| xufuji456/FFmpegAndroid An Android demo application integrating FFmpeg via JNI/NDK for video cropping, watermarking, transcoding, encoding/decoding, GIF conversion… | 71 | 5873 | active |
| mozilla/mozjpeg MozJPEG is an improved JPEG encoder built as a patch on libjpeg-turbo, producing smaller files at higher visual quality while remaining ful… | 32 | 5724 | stable |
| mruby/mruby mruby is a lightweight implementation of the Ruby programming language, ISO-standard compliant and Ruby 4.x syntax compatible, written in C… | 77 | 5617 | stable |
| antirez/sds SDS (Simple Dynamic Strings) is a C string library that augments libc string handling with heap-allocated, binary-safe dynamic strings usin… | 36 | 5577 | stable |
| nanopb/nanopb Nanopb is a small code-size Protocol Buffers implementation in plain ANSI C, designed for microcontrollers and other memory-constrained sys… | 83 | 5568 | stable |
| ThrowTheSwitch/Unity Unity is a lightweight unit testing framework for C, distributed as a single C file and a pair of headers with a rich set of assertion macr… | 81 | 5394 | stable |
| facebookincubator/katran Katran is a C++ library and BPF program for building a high-performance layer 4 load balancing forwarding plane. It leverages the Linux ker… | 77 | 5362 | active |
| lxc/lxc LXC is a low-level Linux container runtime providing a userspace interface to kernel containment features like namespaces, cgroups, and man… | 81 | 5277 | stable |
| raysan5/raygui raygui is a simple, easy-to-use immediate-mode GUI library for C, designed as an auxiliary module for raylib but adaptable to other engines… | 82 | 5172 | active |
| tboox/tbox TBOX is a glib-like cross-platform C library providing containers, algorithms, streams, coroutines, and platform abstractions. It simplifie… | 85 | 5122 | stable |
| RandyGaul/cute_headers A collection of cross-platform, single-file C/C++ header-only libraries with no dependencies, primarily aimed at game development. It inclu… | 72 | 5073 | active |
| Ultralight Ultralight is a lightweight, GPU-accelerated HTML/CSS/JS renderer built on a WebKit fork, embeddable in C/C++ games and desktop apps. It of… | 32 | 5018 | active |
| kokke/tiny-AES-c A small, portable implementation of AES encryption (128/192/256-bit) in C99, supporting ECB, CBC, and CTR modes. It is designed for minimal… | 23 | 5017 | stable |
| Raspberry Pi Pico SDK The official C/C++ SDK for Raspberry Pi Pico and other RP-series microcontrollers, providing headers, libraries, and a CMake-based build sy… | 87 | 4972 | stable |
| ArrayFire ArrayFire is a general-purpose tensor/numerical computing library for C, C++, and Python that accelerates array operations on GPUs (CUDA, O… | 65 | 4903 | stable |
| libpostal libpostal is a C library for parsing and normalizing street addresses from around the world using statistical NLP and open geo data. It con… | 56 | 4894 | stable |
| Greenbone Community Edition OpenVAS Scanner is the scan engine of the Greenbone Community Edition, executing a continuously updated feed of vulnerability tests against… | 95 | 4868 | active |
| google/wuffs Wuffs is a memory-safe programming language plus a standard library for safely parsing, decoding and encoding untrusted file formats such a… | 76 | 4851 | active |
| OpenWiFi Open-source full-stack IEEE 802.11/Wi-Fi design based on Software Defined Radio, including a Linux mac80211-compatible driver and software,… | 66 | 4809 | active |
| yshui/picom picom is a lightweight X11 compositor forked from Compton that adds window effects like shadows, transparency, blur, and animations. It is … | 74 | 4807 | active |
| microsoft/msquic MsQuic is Microsoft's cross-platform C implementation of the IETF QUIC transport protocol (RFC 9000), with API wrappers for C++, C#, and Ru… | 98 | 4781 | stable |
| aws/s2n-tls s2n-tls is a C99 implementation of the TLS/SSL protocols designed to be simple, small, fast, and security-focused, maintained by AWS. It pr… | 98 | 4769 | stable |
| armink/EasyLogger EasyLogger is an ultra-lightweight, high-performance C/C++ logging library designed for resource-constrained projects like IoT products, we… | 63 | 4760 | stable |
| Notcurses Notcurses is a C library (with C++, Rust, and Python bindings) for building complex, vibrant textual user interfaces on modern terminal emu… | 70 | 4741 | active |
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