# librdkafka

The Apache Kafka C/C++ library

Repository: https://github.com/confluentinc/librdkafka
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/librdkafka
Language: C
License: NOASSERTION
License Family: other
Topics: kafka, kafka-consumer, apache-kafka, high-performance, c, librdkafka, kafka-producer, c-plus-plus, consumer
Last push: 2026-08-26T15:32:33+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 92/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 78, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 5096, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": 64, "gap_med": 46, "n_releases_24m": 16}
- flags: no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1038, forks 3255 (observed 2026-08-28T04:03:19.566255+00:00)

## What it is
Confluent's Golang client for Apache Kafka, providing high-level Producer and Consumer APIs with support for balanced consumer groups. It is a lightweight wrapper around librdkafka, a high-performance C client library.

## Use cases
- produce messages to kafka topics from go
- consume kafka messages in a go service
- build event-driven microservices with kafka
- stream data pipelines using kafka in golang
- implement kafka consumer groups in go
- publish and subscribe to event streams

## When to choose
- you need a high-performance, production-grade Kafka client in Go
- you want commercial support from Confluent
- you need feature parity with the latest Apache Kafka protocol
- you want consistent client behavior across Go, Python, and .NET via librdkafka

## When to avoid
- you want a pure-Go client without cgo dependencies (e.g., franz-go or sarama)
- your deployment environment makes compiling C libraries difficult
- you only need simple, low-throughput Kafka access

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: stable
- function: message-queue, streaming, database-driver
- domain: microservices, backend
- platform: go, windows, cross-platform
- tags: kafka, kafka-client, librdkafka, producer, consumer, event-streaming, cgo-bindings, messaging, data-engineering, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- confluentinc/librdkafka (main) score 92
- confluentinc/confluent-kafka-go (sdk) score 92

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:19.566255+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:01:53.751135+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/confluentinc/librdkafka (fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:19.566255+00:00, sha 57d9dc81f8ae)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.