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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| mackron/dr_libs dr_libs is a collection of public domain, single-file audio decoding libraries for C and C++, including dr_flac, dr_mp3, and dr_wav. Each l… | 77 | 1839 | active |
| sm64pc/sm64ex sm64ex is a cross-platform PC port of Super Mario 64, forked from sm64-port with additional features such as an options menu, custom textur… | 32 | 1837 | active |
| fungos/cr cr.h is a single-file, header-only C/C++ library that enables hot reloading of dynamically linked binaries (.so/.dylib/.dll) with a minimal… | 68 | 1810 | stable |
| Hoverboard FOC Firmware Open-source firmware that replaces the stock software on hoverboard mainboards with Field Oriented Control (FOC) for BLDC motors. It delive… | 69 | 1807 | active |
| libtom/libtomcrypt LibTomCrypt is a comprehensive, modular and portable cryptographic toolkit written in C, providing block ciphers, hash functions, chaining … | 64 | 1795 | stable |
| nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha NFS-Ganesha is a user-mode NFS fileserver supporting NFSv3, v4, and v4.1, plus the 9p protocol, running on most UNIX/Linux systems. It can … | 96 | 1791 | active |
| orx/orx Orx is a portable, data-driven 2D/2.5D game engine written in C with C/C++ APIs. It emphasizes configuration-driven object creation, render… | 80 | 1778 | stable |
| GNOME/glib GLib is the low-level core C library underpinning GTK and GNOME, providing data structures, an object system (GObject), an event loop, thre… | 77 | 1773 | stable |
| Skythinker616/foc-wheel-legged-robot A complete open-source wheel-legged balancing robot project covering mechanical design (SolidWorks), physics simulation (MATLAB/Simulink/Si… | 29 | 1769 | stable |
| sp4cerat/Fast-Quadric-Mesh-Simplification A fast, memory-efficient C++ library and CLI tool implementing quadric-based edge collapse mesh simplification to reduce triangle counts in… | 32 | 1767 | stable |
| MatheuZSecurity/Singularity Singularity is a stealthy Linux kernel module (LKM) rootkit targeting modern 6.x kernels, using ftrace-based syscall hooking to hide proces… | 61 | 1766 | active |
| jmcnamara/libxlsxwriter libxlsxwriter is an ANSI C library for creating Excel 2007+ XLSX files with text, numbers, formulas, hyperlinks, charts, images, and full f… | 69 | 1765 | stable |
| lwip-tcpip/lwip lwIP is a lightweight, independent implementation of the TCP/IP protocol suite written in C, designed to minimize RAM and ROM usage. It pro… | 74 | 1764 | stable |
| sekigon-gonnoc/Pico-PIO-USB A C library that implements USB full-speed/low-speed host and device protocols using the PIO (Programmable I/O) blocks of the Raspberry Pi … | 72 | 1756 | active |
| xioTechnologies/Fusion Fusion is a C library for sensor fusion on Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), implementing an AHRS algorithm that combines gyroscope, accel… | 75 | 1744 | stable |
| vstakhov/libucl A C library for parsing and emitting UCL (Universal Configuration Language), an nginx-inspired configuration format fully compatible with J… | 81 | 1743 | stable |
| rougier/freetype-gl A small C library for rendering Unicode text in OpenGL using a single texture atlas and a single vertex buffer, built on top of FreeType. I… | 61 | 1743 | stable |
| libvirt/libvirt Libvirt is a portable, long-term stable C API and toolkit for managing virtualization technologies across many operating systems and hyperv… | 77 | 1738 | stable |
| armink/SFUD SFUD is an open-source universal driver library in C for serial SPI/QSPI flash chips, based on the JEDEC SFDP standard parameter table. It … | 30 | 1726 | stable |
| openucx/ucx Unified Communication X (UCX) is a production-grade, open-source communication framework for high-bandwidth, low-latency networks. It expos… | 90 | 1715 | stable |
| GNOME/gtk GTK is a multi-platform GUI toolkit written in C for building graphical user interfaces, offering a complete set of widgets for projects fr… | 77 | 1704 | stable |
| AxxAxx/AxxSolder AxxSolder is an STM32-based open-source soldering iron controller for JBC C115, C210, and C245 cartridges, available as station and portabl… | 88 | 1697 | active |
| nanomsg/nanomsg nanomsg is a C library implementing lightweight 'scalability protocols' for common messaging patterns such as request/reply, publish/subscr… | 90 | 6297 | maintenance |
| espressif/esp-csi Espressif's official examples and tools for Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) on ESP32-series chips, enabling non-contact wireless sens… | 64 | 1691 | active |
| svaarala/duktape Duktape is an embeddable JavaScript (ECMAScript E5/E5.1 with partial ES2015+) engine written in C, focused on portability and a compact foo… | 65 | 6215 | maintenance |
| lwfinger/rtw88 A downstream backport of the Realtek rtw88 series WiFi 5 drivers from the Linux wireless-next repository, supporting PCIe, SDIO, and USB ch… | 66 | 1672 | active |
| zama-ai/tfhe-rs TFHE-rs is a pure Rust implementation of the TFHE fully homomorphic encryption scheme, enabling boolean and integer arithmetic over encrypt… | 97 | 1667 | active |
| libfuse/libfuse libfuse is the reference userspace library for the Linux FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) interface, letting applications implement and mount… | 94 | 6164 | maintenance |
| pnggroup/libpng libpng is the official reference C library for reading, creating, and manipulating PNG (Portable Network Graphics) raster image files. It h… | 76 | 1657 | stable |
| vk-com/kphp-kdb VK's KittenPHP/DB/Engine suite: a PHP-to-C++ translating compiler (KPHP) plus a set of specialized high-performance non-relational database… | 32 | 6065 | maintenance |
| SELinuxProject/selinux The upstream userspace repository for Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), providing the libraries and tools that complement SELinux support … | 84 | 1634 | stable |
| kuba--/zip A small, portable zip archive library written in C, built on top of the miniz compression library. It provides a simple API for creating, a… | 92 | 1613 | active |
| HandmadeMath/HandmadeMath HandmadeMath is a single-header math library for games and computer graphics, providing vectors, matrices, and quaternions in both C and C+… | 52 | 1613 | stable |
| HelenOS/helenos HelenOS is a portable microkernel-based multiserver operating system written from scratch in C, decomposing OS functionality like file syst… | 67 | 1599 | active |
| libssh2/libssh2 libssh2 is a client-side C library implementing the SSH2 protocol, licensed under the revised BSD license. It provides session establishmen… | 68 | 1596 | stable |
| microprofile Microprofile is an embeddable CPU and GPU profiler written in a few C++ files that you drop into your project. It provides scoped timers, c… | 64 | 1592 | active |
| FDio/vpp FD.io's Vector Packet Processing (VPP) is an extensible, high-performance packet-processing framework providing production-quality switch a… | 77 | 1587 | stable |
| zserge/fenster Fenster is a minimal single-header C99 library for opening a cross-platform window with a 24-bit RGB framebuffer, plus keyboard/mouse input… | 32 | 1580 | active |
| linuxmint/nemo Nemo is the official file manager of the Cinnamon desktop environment, forked from GNOME Files (Nautilus 3.4). It also manages the Cinnamon… | 100 | 1569 | active |
| SuiteSparse SuiteSparse is a collection of sparse matrix algorithm libraries written in C/C++, including factorization packages (UMFPACK, CHOLMOD, SPQR… | 96 | 1561 | stable |
| memononen/nanovg NanoVG is a small antialiased 2D vector graphics rendering library built on OpenGL, with a lean API modeled after the HTML5 canvas API. It … | 59 | 5705 | maintenance |
| Avahi Avahi is a free LGPL implementation of mDNS/DNS-SD (Zeroconf) service discovery for Linux, compatible with Apple Bonjour. It provides a dae… | 68 | 1556 | stable |
| sepfy/libpeer libpeer is a portable WebRTC implementation written in C using BSD sockets, designed for IoT and embedded devices such as ESP32 and Raspber… | 73 | 1553 | active |
| atomicobject/heatshrink Heatshrink is a data compression/decompression library written in C, designed for embedded and real-time systems with very low memory requi… | 32 | 1552 | stable |
| unlir/XDrive XDrive is open-source firmware (with hardware schematics and enclosure designs) for a stepper motor driver featuring a multi-function inter… | 32 | 1550 | active |
| rxi/sj.h sj.h is a tiny ~150-line C99 JSON parsing library distributed as a single header. It performs zero-allocation, streaming-style parsing and … | 34 | 1549 | stable |
| ThakeeNathees/pocketlang Pocketlang is a lightweight, fast, embeddable scripting language written in C with a Ruby-flavored Python-like syntax, including its own by… | 56 | 1548 | active |
| MaJerle/lwrb lwrb is a lightweight, platform-independent C library implementing a generic FIFO ring (cyclic) buffer with no dynamic memory allocation. I… | 84 | 1543 | stable |
| silentbicycle/greatest greatest is a minimal unit testing library for C, distributed as a single header file with no dependencies and no dynamic allocation. It pr… | 32 | 1541 | stable |
| lucavallin/barco barco is a minimal Linux container runtime written in C, built from scratch using kernel features like namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, and ca… | 29 | 1541 | active |
| Tongsuo-Project/Tongsuo Tongsuo (铜锁) is an open-source cryptographic library providing modern cryptographic primitives and secure communication protocols, includin… | 86 | 1540 | active |
| riscv-software-src/opensbi OpenSBI is the open-source reference implementation of the RISC-V Supervisor Binary Interface (SBI) specification, running as firmware in M… | 84 | 1538 | active |
| espressif/esp-sr ESP-SR is Espressif's speech recognition framework for ESP32-series chips, providing wake word detection (WakeNet), voice activity detectio… | 79 | 1534 | active |
| OpenSIPS/opensips OpenSIPS is a GPL-licensed, open-source SIP server/proxy implementation written in C, forked from the SER project. It provides carrier-grad… | 75 | 1532 | stable |
| ngtcp2/ngtcp2 ngtcp2 is a C library implementing the IETF QUIC transport protocol (RFC9000) with no external library dependencies for the core. It includ… | 94 | 1520 | active |
| libgeos/geos GEOS is a C/C++ library for computational geometry on 2D vector geometries, implementing the OGC Simple Features standard. It is a port of … | 98 | 1515 | stable |
| rxi/fe A tiny embeddable Lisp-like scripting language implemented in under 800 lines of portable ANSI C. It offers a simple C API, lexical scoping… | 32 | 1513 | stable |
| Azure IoT Edge Azure IoT Edge is Microsoft's open-source edge runtime that moves cloud analytics and business logic to IoT devices by deploying containeri… | 93 | 1508 | active |
| Wren6991/PicoDVI PicoDVI is a library that bitbangs DVI/HDMI video output directly from RP2040 and RP2350 microcontrollers using PIO, DMA, and overclocked C… | 71 | 1508 | active |
| kokke/tiny-regex-c A small, portable regular expression library written in C, supporting a subset of Python's re-module syntax. It is designed for minimal res… | 32 | 1508 | stable |
| hirrolot/datatype99 A single-header C99 library providing safe algebraic data types (sum types/tagged unions) with exhaustive pattern matching and compile-time… | 24 | 1508 | stable |
| juliettef/IconFontCppHeaders A collection of C/C++ headers plus C#, Python, Rust, and Go files defining icon code points for popular icon fonts like Font Awesome, Mater… | 67 | 1507 | active |
| zlib-ng/minizip-ng minizip-ng is a zip manipulation library written in C, forked from the minizip code contributed to zlib. It adds features like WinZip AES e… | 88 | 1503 | active |
| zpl-c/librg librg is a single-header, cross-platform world replication library written in pure C99 for multiplayer game development. It acts as middlew… | 48 | 1502 | active |
| Cyan4973/FiniteStateEntropy A C library providing two high-speed entropy codecs: Huff0, a Huffman coder optimized for modern out-of-order CPUs, and FSE, an ANS-based e… | 32 | 1502 | stable |
| Cloudef/bemenu bemenu is a dynamic menu library and client program (bemenu, bemenu-run) inspired by dmenu, written in C. It supports multiple renderers in… | 37 | 1501 | active |
| qdtroy/DuiLib_Ultimate DuiLib_Ultimate is an enhanced, actively maintained fork of the duilib DirectUI library for building lightweight, high-performance Windows … | 62 | 1495 | active |
| Softmotions/ejdb EJDB2 is an embeddable JSON document database engine written as a C11 library with a single-file storage format and an XPath-inspired query… | 100 | 1488 | active |
| pg_query libpg_query is a C library that exposes PostgreSQL's actual SQL parser so applications can parse SQL queries and obtain the internal Postgr… | 86 | 1487 | active |
| flyngmt/ACGC-PC-Port A native PC port of Animal Crossing (GameCube) built on the ac-decomp decompilation project, running the game's original C code on x86 with… | 63 | 1484 | active |
| cpputest/cpputest CppUTest is a C/C++ xUnit-style unit testing and mocking framework, written in C++ but usable from both C and C++ projects. It is designed … | 62 | 1483 | stable |
| tmewett/BrogueCE Brogue: Community Edition is a community-maintained fork of the minimalist roguelike game Brogue, written in C. It features randomly genera… | 86 | 1480 | active |
| winsiderss/phnt A collection of Windows Native API (NT API) header files for user-mode C/C++ programs, maintained since 2009 for the Process Hacker/System … | 62 | 1480 | active |
| vslavik/winsparkle WinSparkle is an app update framework for Windows desktop applications, inspired by Sparkle for macOS. It ships as a single dependency-free… | 85 | 1479 | stable |
| kgabis/parson Parson is a lightweight JSON parsing and serialization library written in C, consisting of only two files (parson.c and parson.h). It offer… | 75 | 1474 | stable |
| bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen A suite of bindings generators that produce guest-language bindings from WIT (WebAssembly Interface Types) files for the WebAssembly Compon… | 97 | 1468 | active |
| fholger/vrperfkit A collection of performance-oriented mods for VR games, delivered as a DLL injected next to a game executable. It provides upscaling (AMD F… | 23 | 1468 | active |
| switchbrew/libnx libnx is an AArch64-only userland library for developing Nintendo Switch homebrew software, based on libctru. It provides C APIs for intera… | 88 | 1467 | active |
| fossasia/magic-epaper-firmware Magic ePaper Firmware is open-source C firmware for controlling FOSSASIA's e-ink (e-paper) displays on microcontrollers. It acts as a bridg… | 42 | 1462 | active |
| coredevices/PebbleOS PebbleOS is the open-source operating system firmware for Pebble smartwatches, maintained by Core Devices in C. It provides the watch platf… | 82 | 1460 | active |
| Water-Melon/Melon Melon is a generic cross-platform C library (C99) bundling algorithms, data structures, functional components (memory pool, thread pool, ev… | 67 | 1458 | active |
| dRehmFlight dRehmFlight is an Arduino-compatible flight controller and stabilization codebase for small-scale VTOL aircraft, built on the Teensy 4.0 mi… | 32 | 1456 | active |
| rockchip-linux/kernel A fork of the Linux kernel source maintained by Rockchip as the Board Support Package (BSP) kernel for their SoCs. It provides Rockchip-spe… | 64 | 1444 | active |
| Optiscaler-Client/Optiscaler-Client OptiScaler Client is a cross-platform desktop application for installing, managing, and updating the OptiScaler mod across a user's game li… | 80 | 1435 | active |
| laruence/yar Yar is a lightweight, concurrent RPC framework implemented as a native PHP extension (written in C), supporting HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP transp… | 83 | 1434 | stable |
| nRF Connect SDK Nordic Semiconductor's nRF Connect SDK, the main repository containing subsystems, libraries, samples, and applications for developing firm… | 93 | 1431 | active |
| vurtun/lib A collection of five single-header C/C++ libraries (json.h, sched.h, web.h, sdefl.h, sinfl.h) providing a JSON parser, multithreaded task s… | 34 | 1431 | active |
| sheredom/subprocess.h A single-header C/C++ library for launching and interacting with subprocesses across Linux, macOS, and Windows. It provides APIs to spawn p… | 77 | 1421 | active |
| ddcutil ddcutil is a Linux command-line tool and shared library (libddcutil) for querying and changing monitor settings such as brightness, color l… | 94 | 1418 | active |
| NVIDIA/gdrcopy GDRCopy is a low-latency GPU memory copy library built on NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA technology, allowing CPU-driven copies between host and GPU… | 83 | 1416 | active |
| analogdevicesinc/no-OS Analog Devices' bare-metal C software framework providing device drivers for ADI components on systems without an operating system. It incl… | 89 | 1410 | active |
| eclipse-mraa/mraa Eclipse MRAA is a C/C++ library with bindings for Python, Node.js, and Java for controlling low-speed I/O (GPIO, I2C, SPI, UART) on GNU/Lin… | 72 | 1409 | active |
| ufbx/ufbx ufbx is a single source file FBX file loader written in portable C (also compilable as C++). It parses binary and ASCII FBX files into plai… | 76 | 1408 | active |
| cisco/libsrtp libSRTP is Cisco's open-source C library implementing the Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP, RFC 3711) along with a supporting cryp… | 87 | 1401 | stable |
| libexpat/libexpat Expat is a fast, stream-oriented XML parser library written in C99, well suited for files too large to fit in memory. It is widely packaged… | 95 | 1393 | stable |
| gphoto libgphoto2 is a C library that provides access to and control of digital cameras, supporting PTP, MTP, and many vendor-specific USB protoco… | 83 | 1389 | stable |
| google/pebble The open-sourced PebbleOS firmware source code that runs on Pebble smartwatches, released by Google after Pebble Technology. Proprietary co… | 21 | 4960 | maintenance |
| QuantumLeaps/qpc QP/C is a lightweight real-time event framework (RTEF) for C that implements the event-driven Active Object (Actor) model combined with hie… | 92 | 1384 | stable |
| UV-K5 Custom Firmware A feature-rich custom open-source firmware for the Quansheng UV-K5/K6 handheld ham radio, built in C/C++ by merging multiple open-source fi… | 93 | 1382 | active |
| tidwall/neco Neco is a small, fast C library providing concurrency via stackful coroutines with channels, mutexes, condition variables, and deadline/can… | 60 | 1376 | active |