orangeduck/Cello

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

7128 stars · 386 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Cello is a C library that adds a higher-level runtime system to C, providing generic data structures, polymorphism, interfaces/type classes, optional garbage collection, exceptions, and reflection. It works seamlessly alongside standard C code using tagged fat pointers compatible with normal C pointers.

Use cases

• write generic data structures in C
• add garbage collection to C programs
• use interfaces and type classes in C
• handle exceptions in C
• get reflection and runtime type information in C
• write polymorphic functions in C

When to choose

• you want higher-level abstractions while staying in C
• you need generic collections and iteration in C
• you want optional garbage collection without changing compilers
• you want to interoperate with existing C code and tooling

When to avoid

• you need a non-restrictive license (license is custom/NOASSERTION)
• you need maximum performance with zero runtime overhead
• your team prefers plain idiomatic C or a language with native abstractions like C++ or Rust
• you need a large active community or frequent updates

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

programming-language concurrency error-handling developer-tools programming-languages developer-tools windows cross-platform c high-level-c runtime-system garbage-collection generic-data-structures type-classes reflection fat-pointers algorithms linux macos

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