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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| dotnet/Comet Comet is a C# UI toolkit for building cross-platform user interfaces using the Model-View-Update (MVU) architectural pattern, built on top … | 10 | 1668 | experimental |
| opa334/darksword-kexploit A reimplementation of the DarkSword kernel exploit in Objective-C, targeting iOS 15.0 through 26.0.1. It is a security research artifact ba… | 45 | 1517 | experimental |
| whitequark/unfork unfork(2) is a proof-of-concept Linux technique and library that joins two process address spaces into one, the inverse of fork(2), by comb… | 32 | 1485 | experimental |
| tgfrerer/island Project Island is an experimental Vulkan renderer and engine framework for Linux and Windows, written in C/C++, designed for rapid prototyp… | 67 | 1289 | experimental |
| openairymax/agentrt AgentRT is an OS-grade runtime platform for AI agent teams, providing primitives for orchestrating, scheduling, isolating, and observing ag… | 83 | 1252 | experimental |
| emexlab/Nyxian Nyxian is a native iOS IDE that lets developers write, compile, sign, and run Swift, C, Objective-C, and C++ apps entirely on an iPhone or … | 84 | 1242 | experimental |
| brutal-org/brutal BRUTAL is a hobby operating system built from scratch in modern C, inspired by brutalist design and combining 1970s UNIX ideals with modern… | 64 | 1113 | experimental |
| uTox/uTox µTox is a lightweight cross-platform client for the Tox peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted instant messaging protocol. It supports text cha… | 67 | 1071 | experimental |
| ps5-linux A Linux payload that uses hypervisor (HV) exploits to boot a custom Linux bootloader on PS5 Phat and Slim consoles running firmware 3.00-7.… | 77 | 83 | active |
| vurtun/nuklear Nuklear is a minimal, single-header immediate mode graphical user interface toolkit written in ANSI C (C89) with no dependencies and no def… | 10 | 13974 | abandoned |
| google/sanitizers The Google sanitizers repository hosts documentation and helper code for AddressSanitizer, ThreadSanitizer, MemorySanitizer, LeakSanitizer,… | 76 | 12503 | abandoned |
| apple/darwin-xnu The XNU hybrid kernel (Mach + BSD + IOKit) that powers macOS and iOS, mirrored by Apple on GitHub. This legacy mirror is no longer updated … | 10 | 11266 | abandoned |
| grbl/grbl Grbl is an open-source, embedded, high-performance g-code parser and CNC milling controller written in optimized C for AVR microcontrollers… | 32 | 6295 | abandoned |
| nginx/unit NGINX Unit is a lightweight universal web application server, written in C, that serves static assets, handles TLS, routes requests, and na… | 10 | 5543 | abandoned |
| google/gumbo-parser Gumbo is a pure-C99 HTML5 parsing library originally developed by Google, implementing the WHATWG HTML5 parsing specification. The project … | 10 | 5188 | abandoned |
| Qihoo360/Atlas Atlas is a high-performance MySQL protocol proxy (database middleware) developed by Qihoo 360's DBA and infrastructure team, based on MySQL… | 23 | 4618 | abandoned |
| Grbl Grbl is an open-source, high-performance g-code parser and CNC milling controller firmware written in optimized C for AVR-based Arduino boa… | 23 | 4566 | abandoned |
| intel/haxm Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager is a cross-platform hardware-assisted virtualization engine (hypervisor) that runs as a kernel… | 10 | 3307 | abandoned |
| joyent/libuv libuv is a multi-platform C library focused on asynchronous I/O, providing an event loop backed by epoll, kqueue, and IOCP, plus async TCP/… | 10 | 3240 | abandoned |
| KeenSoftwareHouse/SpaceEngineers The archived source code of Space Engineers, a voxel-based sandbox game by Keen Software House. The repository lets owners of the Steam gam… | 10 | 2977 | abandoned |
| AWS IoT Device SDK for Embedded C AWS's deprecated reference integrations of FreeRTOS libraries for microcontrollers, providing a full project structure with AWS IoT connect… | 10 | 2532 | abandoned |
| kkos/oniguruma Oniguruma is a flexible C regular expression library supporting many regex syntaxes and a wide range of character encodings, historically u… | 10 | 2523 | abandoned |
| antirez/neural-redis A Redis loadable module (written in C) that implements feed-forward neural networks as a native Redis data type. It compresses data collect… | 32 | 2228 | abandoned |
| raspberrypi/userland ARM-side C libraries for interfacing with the Raspberry Pi VideoCore GPU, including EGL, MMAL, OpenMAX IL, GLESv2, and vchiq bindings. The … | 10 | 2068 | abandoned |
| RedisGraph/RedisGraph RedisGraph is a Redis module that adds a property graph database to Redis, queryable with the openCypher query language. It is implemented … | 34 | 2042 | abandoned |
| lattera/glibc A mirror of the GNU C Library (glibc), the standard C library providing the system API for C and C-compatible programs on GNU/Linux and GNU… | 10 | 1969 | abandoned |
| nicolaschengdev/WYPopoverController WYPopoverController is an Objective-C library for presenting customizable popover content on iPhone and iPad, working like UIPopoverControl… | 23 | 1922 | abandoned |
| pmwkaa/sophia Sophia is a transactional MVCC key-value/row storage engine implemented as a small, dependency-free C library with a minimalistic, FFI-frie… | 51 | 1887 | abandoned |
| monyhar/monyhar-lite Monyhar Lite is a satirical joke browser project claiming to be a fully self-developed Chinese browser that is 600% faster than Chrome, whi… | 32 | 1763 | abandoned |
| pulseaudio-modules-bt A fork of PulseAudio's Bluetooth modules that adds LDAC, aptX, aptX HD, and AAC codec support for A2DP audio on Linux, plus extended SBC co… | 10 | 1760 | abandoned |
| facebookarchive/libphenom libPhenom is a C eventing framework from Facebook for building high-performance, scalable systems, offering job scheduling, buffered stream… | 10 | 1663 | abandoned |
| UncleRus/esp-idf-lib A collection of ESP-IDF components (drivers for sensors, LED controllers, GPIO extenders, ADC/DAC, and other peripherals) for Espressif ESP… | 10 | 1608 | abandoned |
| facebookarchive/flashcache Flashcache is a Linux kernel module (device-mapper target) that provides a general-purpose write-back block cache, using an SSD to cache re… | 10 | 1597 | abandoned |
| zeustrojancode/Zeus A GitHub mirror of the leaked source code (version 2.0.8.9) of the Zeus trojan, a notorious Windows banking malware from 2007-2011 that sto… | 10 | 1566 | abandoned |
| kennytm/iphone-private-frameworks A collection of C headers for private frameworks and undocumented interfaces of iPhoneOS 3.x and earlier, used for jailbroken iOS tweak dev… | 10 | 1460 | abandoned |
| pmem/pmdk The Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK) is a collection of C libraries and tools (libpmem, libpmem2, libpmemobj, and others) for manag… | 10 | 1388 | abandoned |
| SonyWWS/LevelEditor Sony's standalone WYSIWYG level editor for designing game levels, maps, and virtual worlds, built on the Authoring Tools Framework with C# … | 32 | 1376 | abandoned |
| cepr/android-serialport-api A small Android library with NDK/JNI native code for opening and reading/writing serial ports (RS-232/tty devices) on Android, plus a demo … | 32 | 1308 | abandoned |
| twitter/fatcache Fatcache is a networked, memcached-protocol-compatible cache that uses SSD storage as an extension of DRAM, allowing terabyte-scale caching… | 10 | 1299 | abandoned |
| sakra/cotire Cotire is a CMake module that speeds up C/C++ builds by automatically setting up precompiled headers and single compilation unit (unity) bu… | 10 | 1296 | abandoned |
| danielwaterworth/Raphters Raphters is a web framework for C based on the rapht architectural pattern, providing components like cookie handling, session management, … | 32 | 1276 | abandoned |
| amaneureka/AtomOS AtomOS is a multitasking monolithic kernel-based x86 operating system written from scratch in C#, targeting high-level driver implementatio… | 32 | 1267 | abandoned |
| xiph/LPCNet LPCNet is a low-complexity C implementation of the WaveRNN-based LPCNet neural vocoder for efficient speech synthesis and compression. It a… | 32 | 1224 | abandoned |
| dtrace4linux/linux A Linux port of Sun's DTrace dynamic tracing framework, delivered as a dynamically loadable kernel module plus userland tools. It brings DT… | 32 | 1206 | abandoned |
| LeagueSandbox An open-source game server implementation emulating the core gameplay of League of Legends, written in C#. It was archived in September 202… | 10 | 1171 | abandoned |
| sharebrained/portapack-hackrf Original firmware for the PortaPack H1, an add-on that makes the HackRF One software-defined radio portable with an LCD touchscreen, audio … | 10 | 1096 | abandoned |
| adamdunkels/uip uIP is a very small TCP/IP stack implementation written in C by Adam Dunkels, designed for resource-constrained embedded systems. This repo… | 32 | 1088 | abandoned |
| appunite/AndroidFFmpeg A deprecated Android library project that builds FFmpeg for multiple Android architectures (armeabi, armeabi-v7a, x86) with JNI bindings an… | 32 | 1066 | abandoned |
| AsahiLinux/gpu Research repository for reverse-engineering the Apple M1 GPU to build an open-source 3D graphics stack, including a Metal API interception … | 10 | 1050 | abandoned |
| PS4-SDK An open source PlayStation 4 SDK for writing userland homebrew applications in C, run via the PS4-playground loader. It provides system cal… | 10 | 1041 | abandoned |
| fail0verflow/hbc The Homebrew Channel for the Nintendo Wii, an open-source loader that lets users install and run homebrew applications on a Wii console. It… | 10 | 1015 | abandoned |
| curl Docker images curl is a command-line tool and libcurl is a C library for transferring data to or from servers using URL syntax, supporting dozens of prot… | 95 | 43152 | stable |
| libuv/libuv libuv is a cross-platform C library providing asynchronous I/O via a full-featured event loop backed by epoll, kqueue, IOCP, and event port… | 90 | 27272 | stable |
| google/flatbuffers FlatBuffers is Google's cross-platform, memory-efficient serialization library that stores data in a binary format you can read directly wi… | 80 | 26561 | stable |
| lionsoul2014/ip2region ip2region is an offline IP-to-region localization library and IP data management framework supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 with city-level re… | 98 | 19713 | stable |
| ESP-IDF ESP-IDF is the official development framework for Espressif SoCs such as the ESP32 series, providing toolchains, build system, RTOS compone… | 98 | 19217 | stable |
| µWebSockets µWebSockets is a C/C++ web server library providing highly optimized HTTP and WebSocket handling with a built-in URL router and pub/sub fea… | 92 | 18993 | stable |
| Simple DirectMedia Layer Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform C library providing low-level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics h… | 99 | 16836 | stable |
| glfw/glfw GLFW is a multi-platform C library for creating windows, OpenGL/OpenGL ES contexts and Vulkan surfaces, and handling input and events. It p… | 79 | 15398 | stable |
| memcached/memcached Memcached is a high-performance, multithreaded, distributed in-memory key-value cache store used to speed up dynamic web applications by al… | 75 | 14296 | stable |
| libsodium libsodium is a modern, portable, easy-to-use C library for cryptographic operations, forked from NaCl with a compatible but extended API. I… | 81 | 13997 | stable |
| FreeRDP FreeRDP is a free, open-source implementation of Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), provided as a C library plus client application… | 99 | 13827 | stable |
| microsoft/mimalloc mimalloc is a compact general-purpose memory allocator developed by Microsoft, serving as a drop-in replacement for malloc with excellent p… | 98 | 13475 | stable |
| cesanta/mongoose Mongoose is a two-file C networking library and embedded web server providing HTTP, WebSocket, MQTT, TLS 1.3, and an optional built-in TCP/… | 91 | 13080 | stable |
| libevent libevent is a C library providing a portable event notification API that executes callbacks on file descriptor events, timeouts, and signal… | 90 | 11972 | stable |
| gcc-mirror/gcc The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the canonical open-source compiler toolchain supporting C, C++, Fortran, Ada, Go, and other languages wi… | 77 | 11301 | stable |
| eclipse-mosquitto/mosquitto Eclipse Mosquitto is an open source MQTT message broker implementing MQTT versions 5.0, 3.1.1, and 3.1, written in C and suitable for devic… | 76 | 11261 | stable |
| bellard/quickjs QuickJS is a small, embeddable JavaScript engine written in C that supports the ES2025 specification with near-complete test262 conformance… | 76 | 11015 | active |
| floooh/sokol Sokol is a collection of minimal, STB-style, cross-platform standalone C header libraries for graphics rendering, audio, input, and app win… | 77 | 10363 | stable |
| peng-zhihui/ElectronBot ElectronBot is an open-source mini desktop robot inspired by EVE from WALL-E, featuring 6 degrees of freedom, USB communication, and a disp… | 32 | 9511 | active |
| unicorn-engine/unicorn Unicorn is a lightweight, multi-architecture CPU emulator framework based on QEMU, supporting ARM, ARM64, M68K, MIPS, PowerPC, RISC-V, SPAR… | 67 | 9388 | stable |
| Capstone Engine Capstone is a lightweight, multi-architecture, multi-platform disassembly framework written in pure C, designed to be the ultimate disassem… | 98 | 9066 | stable |
| NodeMCU NodeMCU is an open-source Lua-based interactive firmware for the ESP8266, ESP8285, and ESP32 WiFi SoCs, implemented in C on top of the Espr… | 58 | 7945 | active |
| OpenMathLib/OpenBLAS OpenBLAS is an optimized open-source implementation of the BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library, based on GotoBLAS2, with LAPACK… | 89 | 7587 | stable |
| mackron/miniaudio miniaudio is an audio playback and capture library for C and C++ distributed as a single source file with no external dependencies. It prov… | 79 | 7383 | stable |
| liuliu/ccv ccv is a modern, minimalist computer vision library written in C/C++ with an application-driven set of state-of-the-art algorithms includin… | 77 | 7247 | active |
| Prism Prism is a .NET framework for building loosely coupled, maintainable, and testable XAML applications across WPF, Avalonia, MAUI, Uno Platfo… | 67 | 6852 | stable |
| nayuki/QR-Code-generator A high-quality QR Code generator library implemented independently from the ISO/IEC 18004 (QR Code Model 2) specification, available in Jav… | 75 | 6775 | stable |
| U8g2 U8g2 is a monochrome graphics library for embedded devices, supporting a wide range of OLED and LCD display controllers with drawing primit… | 75 | 6691 | stable |
| FASTSHIFT/X-TRACK An open-source GPS bicycle computer (speedometer) built on an AT32F435 MCU with an LVGL-based UI, supporting offline maps, real-time positi… | 42 | 6303 | active |
| Sylinko/Everywhere Everywhere is a cross-platform desktop AI assistant with on-screen awareness that reads the context of whatever app you're using via access… | 80 | 6295 | active |
| HarfBuzz HarfBuzz is a text shaping engine that converts Unicode text into properly positioned glyph output for any writing system, supporting OpenT… | 99 | 6165 | stable |
| nesbox/TIC-80 TIC-80 is a free, open-source fantasy computer for making, playing, and sharing tiny retro games. It bundles code, sprite, map, and sound e… | 85 | 6135 | active |
| Wasm Micro Runtime WebAssembly Micro Runtime (WAMR) is a lightweight standalone WebAssembly runtime with a small footprint, supporting interpreter, AOT, and J… | 89 | 6133 | active |
| tmate tmate is a fork of the tmux terminal multiplexer that adds instant terminal sharing over the network. It generates a shareable SSH connecti… | 62 | 6130 | stable |
| seL4/seL4 seL4 is a formally verified microkernel operating system kernel written in C, providing high-assurance isolation and capability-based secur… | 87 | 5821 | active |
| RIOT OS RIOT is an open-source, vendor-independent operating system for Internet of Things and embedded devices, supporting 8/16/32-bit microcontro… | 93 | 5820 | active |
| AidLux (AidLearning) AidLux (originally AidLearning) is an AIoT development platform that runs a native Ubuntu Linux environment with GUI, deep learning tooling… | 63 | 5812 | active |
| LuaJIT/LuaJIT LuaJIT is a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler for the Lua programming language, offering a high-performance interpreter and trace compiler. It in… | 77 | 5803 | stable |
| apache/opendal Apache OpenDAL is an Open Data Access Layer providing one unified API to access object storage, file systems, cloud SaaS, databases, protoc… | 98 | 5400 | stable |
| warmcat/libwebsockets Libwebsockets is a lightweight, pure C networking library providing client and server implementations for HTTP/1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, WebSocket… | 76 | 5331 | stable |
| ossec/ossec-hids OSSEC is an open-source host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS) that combines log analysis, file integrity monitoring, rootkit detecti… | 94 | 5062 | stable |
| nghttp2/nghttp2 nghttp2 is a mature C library implementing the HTTP/2 framing layer and HPACK header compression, plus client, server, proxy, and load-test… | 89 | 5053 | stable |
| torproject/tor Tor is the core implementation of the Tor anonymity network, routing internet traffic through onion circuits to hide a user's IP address an… | 32 | 5052 | active |
| nanomsg/nng NNG (nanomsg-next-generation) is a lightweight, broker-less messaging library in C implementing scalability protocols like pub/sub, request… | 96 | 4691 | stable |
| ntop/nDPI nDPI is an open source LGPLv3 C library for deep packet inspection that detects 450+ layer-7 application protocols from network traffic. It… | 84 | 4613 | stable |
| Janet programming language Janet is a dynamic functional and imperative Lisp-like programming language with its own bytecode VM, implemented in a single embeddable C … | 94 | 4463 | stable |
| libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo libjpeg-turbo is a SIMD-accelerated JPEG image codec library that is API/ABI-compatible with libjpeg and generally 2-6x faster. It provides… | 86 | 4454 | stable |
| libffi/libffi libffi is a portable C library providing a high-level interface to various calling conventions, allowing code to call compiled functions wh… | 90 | 4394 | stable |
| Open Location Code Open Location Code is a multi-language library that encodes latitude/longitude into short 'Plus Codes' usable as digital street addresses w… | 52 | 4364 | stable |