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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| INAV INAV is open-source navigation-enabled flight controller firmware for drones, planes, and other RC aircraft. It provides autopilot features… | 86 | 4268 | active |
| stephane/libmodbus libmodbus is a free, dependency-free C library for sending and receiving data with devices that speak the Modbus protocol over serial (RTU)… | 75 | 4258 | stable |
| apache/nuttx Apache NuttX is a mature, open-source real-time operating system (RTOS) for embedded systems with an emphasis on POSIX/ANSI standards compl… | 77 | 4071 | stable |
| Dora Dora is a Rust-based dataflow middleware framework for building real-time robotics and AI applications, where applications are modeled as d… | 95 | 4030 | active |
| MeshCore MeshCore is a lightweight C++ library and firmware implementing a hybrid multi-hop mesh routing protocol for LoRa packet radios, enabling e… | 84 | 3915 | active |
| openbsd/src A read-only Git mirror of OpenBSD's official CVS source repository containing the complete operating system source tree, including the kern… | 77 | 3902 | active |
| premake/premake-core Premake is a command-line build configuration tool that reads a Lua-scripted project definition and generates project files for toolsets li… | 95 | 3647 | stable |
| libarchive/libarchive A portable C library for reading and writing streaming archives in many formats (tar, cpio, zip, 7zip, ISO, xar, cab, rar, etc.) with autom… | 95 | 3646 | stable |
| ashvardanian/StringZilla StringZilla is a high-performance string processing library for C, C++, Python, Rust, Swift, JS, and Go that uses SIMD, SWAR, and GPU instr… | 94 | 3570 | active |
| Boehm-Demers-Weiser Garbage Collector The Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector (libgc) for C and C++, usable as a drop-in replacement for malloc/new that automatic… | 86 | 3545 | stable |
| Auburn/FastNoiseLite FastNoise Lite is a highly portable noise generation library offering 2D/3D Perlin, OpenSimplex2, Cellular (Voronoi), Value, and Cubic nois… | 59 | 3527 | stable |
| google/honggfuzz Honggfuzz is a security-oriented, feedback-driven evolutionary fuzzer that uses software and hardware code coverage to discover bugs in bin… | 66 | 3397 | active |
| tuyoogame/YooAsset YooAsset is an open-source Unity3D resource management system for packaging, downloading, and loading game assets. It supports zero-resourc… | 96 | 3374 | active |
| collectd/collectd collectd is a lightweight daemon written in C that periodically collects system and application performance metrics and stores or forwards … | 57 | 3369 | stable |
| GStreamer/gstreamer GStreamer is an open-source multimedia framework for building pipelines that handle audio and video streaming, playback, recording, and pro… | 77 | 3344 | stable |
| matrixcascade/PainterEngine PainterEngine is a cross-platform application/game engine written in C with a built-in software renderer, portable to any platform supporti… | 75 | 3326 | active |
| AWTK AWTK (Toolkit AnyWhere) is an open-source cross-platform GUI engine written in C, developed by ZLG, targeting embedded systems, RTOS platfo… | 77 | 3323 | active |
| Apache Avro Apache Avro is a data serialization system providing rich data structures, a compact binary format, container files, and RPC support, with … | 85 | 3307 | stable |
| tsoding/nob.h nob.h is a single-header C library for writing build recipes (build systems) in plain C, requiring nothing but a C compiler to bootstrap. I… | 65 | 3287 | active |
| facebook/openzl OpenZL is a format-aware lossless data compression framework from Meta that builds specialized compressors from a description of your data … | 76 | 3272 | active |
| open62541/open62541 open62541 is an open-source C99 implementation of the OPC UA (IEC 62541) communication protocol for building OPC UA clients and servers or … | 96 | 3233 | stable |
| yitter/IdGenerator A high-performance unique numeric ID generator library implementing an optimized Snowflake ('drift') algorithm, natively available in C#, J… | 26 | 3213 | active |
| polardb/PolarDB-for-PostgreSQL PolarDB for PostgreSQL is a cloud-native, PostgreSQL-compatible database system developed by Alibaba Cloud. It uses a shared-storage archit… | 90 | 3205 | active |
| the-tcpdump-group/libpcap libpcap is a system-independent C/C++ library providing a portable API for user-level network packet capture, with BPF-based filtering and … | 76 | 3174 | stable |
| Unity-Technologies/Graphics The public mirror of Unity's Graphics repository containing the Scriptable Render Pipeline (SRP), including the Universal Render Pipeline (… | 76 | 3004 | active |
| phoboslab/wipeout-rewrite A C re-implementation of the 1995 PlayStation racing game wipEout, playable in the browser via Emscripten or as a native desktop build. It … | 68 | 2969 | active |
| nigels-com/glew GLEW (The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library) is a cross-platform C/C++ library for loading and querying OpenGL extensions at runtime. It ex… | 80 | 2901 | stable |
| openmv/openmv OpenMV is an open-source machine vision platform consisting of camera hardware firmware programmable in Python 3 (MicroPython). The firmwar… | 93 | 2871 | active |
| Xash3D FWGS Xash3D FWGS is a cross-platform game engine forked from Xash3D, aimed at compatibility with the Half-Life (GoldSrc) engine while extending … | 86 | 2847 | active |
| bradvin/social-share-urls A multi-language collection of libraries and reference documentation for generating social media share URLs (e.g., Facebook, Twitter share … | 23 | 2832 | active |
| mono/mono Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime, inc… | 32 | 11466 | maintenance |
| IoLanguage/io Io is a small, dynamic prototype-based programming language implemented in C, inspired by Self, Smalltalk, Lisp, and Lua, where everything … | 67 | 2803 | active |
| DynamoRIO/drmemory Dr. Memory is a memory debugger that detects memory errors such as uninitialized reads, heap overflows, use-after-free, double frees, and m… | 60 | 2754 | active |
| concurrencykit/ck Concurrency Kit (ck) is a C99 library providing concurrency primitives, safe memory reclamation mechanisms (epoch-based and hazard pointers… | 66 | 2705 | stable |
| pjsip/pjproject PJSIP is an open-source multimedia communication library written in C that implements SIP, SDP, RTP, STUN, TURN, and ICE protocols with hig… | 82 | 2697 | stable |
| vmware/open-vm-tools open-vm-tools is VMware's open-source implementation of VMware Tools, a suite of services, plugins, and kernel modules that improve managem… | 72 | 2679 | stable |
| open-mpi/ompi Open MPI is an open-source, standards-conformant implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) for high-performance computing, deve… | 76 | 2663 | stable |
| LÖVR LÖVR is an open-source Lua framework for rapidly building 3D games and VR experiences, written in C11 and scripted with LuaJIT. It provides… | 82 | 2612 | active |
| NicoHood/HID An Arduino library that adds enhanced USB HID functionality to standard Arduino boards, enabling them to act as keyboards, mice, gamepads, … | 23 | 2566 | stable |
| AprilTag AprilTag is a small C library implementing a visual fiducial (marker) detection system, computing the precise 3D position, orientation, and… | 65 | 2548 | stable |
| homuler/MediaPipeUnityPlugin A Unity native plugin that ports the MediaPipe C++ API to C#, enabling MediaPipe graphs and solutions to run inside Unity applications. It … | 56 | 2484 | active |
| mavlink/mavlink MAVLink is a lightweight, header-only message marshalling library and protocol for communication between drones, onboard components, and gr… | 77 | 2465 | stable |
| wiredtiger/wiredtiger WiredTiger is a high-performance, scalable NoSQL data management platform and storage engine library written in C, developed by MongoDB as … | 68 | 2429 | stable |
| xiph/flac FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is the open-source reference implementation of a patent-free lossless audio compression format, comprising… | 61 | 2426 | stable |
| facil.io facil.io is a high-performance C micro-framework for web applications, providing an evented HTTP/1.1, WebSocket, and SSE server with pub/su… | 54 | 2408 | active |
| Snaipe/Criterion Criterion is a cross-platform unit testing framework for C and C++ that automatically registers tests and provides a xUnit-style structure … | 66 | 2304 | active |
| libusb/hidapi HIDAPI is a cross-platform C library for communicating with USB and Bluetooth HID-class devices on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Andr… | 67 | 2290 | stable |
| JasonXuDeveloper/JEngine JEngine is a Unity framework that enables runtime hot updates for games, letting developers push code, assets, and logic changes without re… | 73 | 2242 | active |
| rurban/smhasher SMhasher is a test suite for evaluating the quality and speed of non-cryptographic and cryptographic hash functions. It benchmarks throughp… | 75 | 2177 | active |
| PortAudio/portaudio PortAudio is a cross-platform open-source C library for real-time audio input and output. It supports callback-based and blocking read/writ… | 67 | 2152 | stable |
| bluekitchen/btstack BTstack is BlueKitchen's dual-mode Bluetooth stack (Classic + Low Energy) implemented in C with an ultra-small, highly configurable memory … | 76 | 2144 | active |
| DanBloomberg/leptonica Leptonica is an open-source C library providing a broad set of image processing and image analysis operations, with a focus on document ima… | 74 | 2092 | stable |
| Wasm3 Wasm3 is a fast WebAssembly interpreter and universal WASM runtime written in C, usable as a CLI tool or embedded library with bindings for… | 97 | 8037 | maintenance |
| jerryscript-project/jerryscript JerryScript is an ultra-lightweight JavaScript engine written in C99 for resource-constrained devices like microcontrollers, running in und… | 39 | 7418 | maintenance |
| EPDiy EPDiy is a driver board and accompanying software library for driving affordable E-Paper (E-Ink) display modules, typically salvaged from e… | 92 | 1946 | active |
| SIPSorcery SIPSorcery is a C#/.NET library implementing SIP, WebRTC, RTP, ICE, STUN and SDP for building real-time communication applications. It is p… | 75 | 1945 | active |
| strukturag/libde265 libde265 is an open source implementation of the H.265 (HEVC) video codec written from scratch in C++ with a plain C API for easy integrati… | 97 | 1922 | stable |
| TuyaOpen TuyaOpen is an open-source, cross-platform C/C++ SDK and IoT OS for building AI-agent hardware on Tuya T-series MCUs, ESP32, Beken, LN882H,… | 86 | 1888 | active |
| litespeedtech/lsquic LSQUIC is an open-source C library implementing the QUIC transport protocol and HTTP/3 for both servers and clients, used in production by … | 100 | 1878 | active |
| emsec/ChameleonMini ChameleonMini is a freely programmable, portable NFC device that can emulate and clone contactless smartcards, read RFID tags, and sniff/lo… | 23 | 1877 | active |
| zengzhan/qqzeng-ip A high-performance IP geolocation lookup engine (QZDB) with multi-language SDKs (Rust, C/C++, Go, Java, C#, Node.js, Python, PHP) that reso… | 76 | 1856 | active |
| trezor/trezor-firmware The official open-source firmware monorepo for Trezor hardware wallets, containing firmware for Trezor One and Trezor T/Safe devices, a sta… | 76 | 1837 | active |
| metacall/core MetaCall is an extensible, embeddable polyglot runtime that lets you call functions, methods, or procedures across multiple programming lan… | 99 | 1827 | active |
| pikasTech/PikaPython PikaPython is an ultra-lightweight Python interpreter written in C that runs on microcontrollers with as little as 4KB of RAM and 64KB of f… | 81 | 1755 | active |
| apache/plc4x Apache PLC4X is a set of multi-language libraries (Java, Go, Python, C/C++, .NET) providing a unified API for communicating with industrial… | 97 | 1754 | stable |
| waveshareteam/e-Paper Waveshare's official driver and example code library for their e-Paper (e-ink) display modules, supporting Raspberry Pi, Jetson Nano, Ardui… | 73 | 1743 | active |
| file/file The classic Unix file(1) command and libmagic library that identifies file types by inspecting file contents and magic numbers rather than … | 77 | 1670 | stable |
| XZ Utils XZ Utils is a complete C99 implementation of the .xz file format, consisting of the liblzma compression library (with a zlib-like API) and … | 86 | 1660 | stable |
| OpenAtomFoundation/TobudOS TobudOS (formerly TencentOS Tiny) is a real-time operating system for IoT devices, incubated by the OpenAtom Foundation after being donated… | 23 | 5939 | maintenance |
| miniupnp/miniupnp MiniUPnP is a lightweight ANSI C implementation of the UPnP Internet Gateway Device (IGD) specifications, comprising a client library (mini… | 96 | 1612 | stable |
| libressl/portable LibreSSL Portable is the portable build of LibreSSL, a TLS and cryptography stack forked from OpenSSL 1.0.1g by the OpenBSD project. It pro… | 99 | 1500 | stable |
| acados/acados acados is a modular C library providing fast embedded solvers for nonlinear optimal control problems, designed for real-time applications l… | 91 | 1493 | active |
| Mithril-mine/libmdbx libmdbx is an extremely fast, compact, embedded transactional key-value storage engine with ACID transactions, MVCC, and memory-mapped B+tr… | 92 | 1466 | stable |
| cr-marcstevens/sha1collisiondetection A C library and command-line tool that computes SHA-1 hashes while detecting known cryptanalytic collision attacks against SHA-1 with proba… | 41 | 1420 | stable |
| Gunslinger Gunslinger is a header-only C99 framework for building games and multimedia applications, bundling platform, graphics, and audio layers wit… | 59 | 1416 | active |
| ashinn/chibi-scheme Chibi-Scheme is a minimal Scheme implementation designed to be embedded as an extension and scripting language in C programs. It supports R… | 76 | 1405 | stable |
| acoustid/chromaprint Chromaprint is a C library for generating compact audio fingerprints, developed for the AcoustID music identification project. It includes … | 78 | 1393 | active |
| emoon/minifb MiniFB is a small cross-platform C library for creating a window and drawing raw 32-bit pixels into a framebuffer. It handles window creati… | 99 | 1383 | active |
| HoloCubic_AIO HoloCubic_AIO is an open-source all-in-one third-party firmware for the HoloCubic ESP32-based holographic desktop device, bundling apps lik… | 25 | 1370 | active |
| LibVNC/libvncserver LibVNCServer/LibVNCClient are cross-platform C libraries for implementing VNC server and client functionality using the RFB protocol. LibVN… | 68 | 1367 | stable |
| msteinbeck/tinyspline TinySpline is a small ANSI C library for interpolating, transforming, and querying NURBS, B-Splines, and Bézier curves, with a C++ object-o… | 23 | 1352 | stable |
| LekKit/RVVM RVVM is a high-performance RISC-V virtual machine and emulator written in C, featuring a tracing JIT with x86_64, ARM64, and RISC-V backend… | 67 | 1310 | active |
| alibaba/AliOS-Things AliOS Things is Alibaba's open-source, highly scalable IoT operating system built around the Rhino RTOS kernel, supporting ARM, C-Sky, MIPS… | 23 | 4629 | maintenance |
| sensorium/Mozzi Mozzi is an open-source sound synthesis library for Arduino and compatible microcontrollers, providing oscillators, envelopes, filters, del… | 72 | 1291 | active |
| rswinkle/PortableGL PortableGL is a software implementation of OpenGL 3.x core written in clean C99 as a single-header library in the style of the stb librarie… | 80 | 1286 | active |
| open-watcom/open-watcom-v2 Open Watcom V2 is the continued development of the classic Watcom C/C++ and Fortran compiler toolchain, including compilers, linker, debugg… | 86 | 1285 | active |
| wmcbrine/PDCurses PDCurses is a public domain curses library implementing most X/Open and System V R4 curses functions for platforms that don't fit the termc… | 66 | 1254 | stable |
| mz-automation/libiec61850 libiec61850 is an open-source (GPLv3) C library implementing the IEC 61850 client and server protocols MMS, GOOSE, Sampled Values, and R-Se… | 81 | 1226 | stable |
| lcm-proj/lcm LCM (Lightweight Communications and Marshalling) is a set of libraries and tools for low-latency, high-bandwidth publish/subscribe message … | 86 | 1211 | stable |
| Amazon Kinesis Video Streams Producer SDK A pure C WebRTC client SDK for Amazon Kinesis Video Streams that enables real-time audio/video communication between embedded devices and t… | 91 | 1209 | active |
| ianlancetaylor/libbacktrace A C library that can be linked into C/C++ programs to produce symbolic backtraces, supporting ELF, PE/COFF, Mach-O, and XCOFF executables w… | 74 | 1202 | stable |
| rusEFI rusEFI is a GPL open-source internal combustion engine control unit (ECU) project, including STM32 firmware, KiCAD hardware designs, a Java… | 88 | 1194 | active |
| pytorch/cpuinfo A C/C++ library that detects CPU information essential for performance optimization, including supported instruction sets, cache details, c… | 71 | 1189 | stable |
| Xinyuan-LilyGO/T-Display-S3 Official examples, pin maps, and support library for the LilyGO T-Display-S3 ESP32-S3 development board with a 1.9-inch 170x320 ST7789 disp… | 74 | 1186 | active |
| dos-like A small C framework, like a tiny game engine, for writing games and programs that recreate the look, feel, and sound of early-90s MS-DOS so… | 52 | 1186 | active |
| vlm/asn1c asn1c is an open-source ASN.1 to C compiler that generates C/C++-compatible source code from ASN.1 module files. The generated code seriali… | 74 | 1178 | stable |
| espressif/esp-dl ESP-DL is Espressif's lightweight neural network inference framework for ESP-series chips, with a custom .espdl model format, quantization … | 69 | 1168 | active |
| metartc/metaRTC MetaRTC is a pure C WebRTC SDK designed for embedded, IoT, and robotics devices, implementing a complete WebRTC protocol stack (ICE, DTLS/S… | 72 | 1158 | active |
| ricardoquesada/bluepad32 Bluepad32 is a Bluetooth controller host library that adds gamepad, mouse, and keyboard support to embedded projects on ESP32 variants, Ras… | 66 | 1146 | active |
| savoirfairelinux/opendht OpenDHT is a lightweight C++17 distributed hash table (DHT) library providing an easy-to-use distributed in-memory data store with redundan… | 96 | 1145 | active |