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Top 23 C CPP Projects
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Project mention: Sharp: High performance Node.js image processing/optimization | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-12-16
Also worth mentioning libvips[0] the underlying engine behind sharp. We use the golang wrapper at work and love the simplicity and speed (ofc)
[0]https://github.com/libvips/libvips
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yugabyte-db
YugabyteDB - the cloud native distributed SQL database for mission-critical applications.
Defaults may be inconsistent. SELECT FOR UPDATE without OF locks all joined rows, but UPDATE on a join behaves differently as we will demonstrate below. Column-level locking also raises another issue without joins: check constraints must see a consistent state, even for columns that were not updated (see the now-fixed YugabyteDB issue: https://github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db/issues/15196).
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Project mention: Show HN: M. C. Escher spiral in WebGL inspired by 3Blue1Brown | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-05
Yes, if you intend to make a networked game, write your netcode first, share state with client(s) over a network protocol, even if the network is 127.0.0.0/8
Netcode is its own area of study:
- https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Latency_Compensatin...
- https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_...
- https://github.com/0xFA11/MultiplayerNetworkingResources
Gamers have opinions about netcode, because it affects how they have to think in order to play the game, so netcode becomes as much a creative endeavour as the level design, graphics, etc.
Every area of endeavour you've mentioned is a fractal of timesuck. They all have their basics and then their advancements, that have been built up by thousands of people over decades.
If you are learning by doing, for god's sake, keep it simple. Make the simplest thing that works. If you're making an FPS, have static geometry and non-animated character models (a 2D sprite will do). Prioritise having the most basic thing working as your goal. Otherwise you will be off in the weeds for years and you'll probably give up having built nothing.
what day 0 to day 1000 of a game looks like -
ravynos
An open-source OS project that aims to provide source and binary compatibility with macOS® and a similar user experience.
Project mention: New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-11-20 -
There's already one available at https://sqlitestudio.pl/, which I've been using for many years, and it's very stable.
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webui
Use any web browser or WebView as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend and modern web technologies in the frontend, all in a lightweight portable library.
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bdwgc
The Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative C/C++ Garbage Collector (bdwgc, also known as bdw-gc, boehm-gc, libgc)
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NumKong
SIMD-accelerated distances, dot products, matrix ops, geospatial & geometric kernels for 16 numeric types — from 6-bit floats to 64-bit complex — across x86, Arm, RISC-V, and WASM, with bindings for Python, Rust, C, C++, Swift, JS, and Go 📐
Usearch (Smaller & Faster Single-File Similarity Search & Clustering Engine for Vectors & 🔜 Texts): https://github.com/unum-cloud/usearch
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Hacking-Windows
A FREE Windows C development course where we will learn the Win32API and reverse engineer each step utilizing IDA Free in both an x86 and x64 environment.
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SuiteSparse
The official SuiteSparse library: a suite of sparse matrix algorithms authored or co-authored by Tim Davis, Texas A&M University. No AI generated code
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IconFontCppHeaders
C and C++ headers, C# and Python classes, Rust files and Go package for icon fonts Font Awesome, Fork Awesome, Google Material Design icons and symbols, Pictogrammers Material Design icons, Kenney game icons, Fontaudio, Codicons and Lucide.
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libtcod
A collection of tools and algorithms for developing traditional roguelikes. Such as field-of-view, pathfinding, and a tile-based terminal emulator.
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Project mention: Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate Beautiful PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-08-20
Thank you for your kind words. Building an HTML and CSS rendering engine has been a long journey full of surprises. I have been maintaining https://github.com/sammycage/lunasvg for years, so I was familiar with interpreting specs and rendering engines. That experience gave me the confidence to tackle HTML.
At first, my plan was simple. I wanted to create an HTML rendering library. But very quickly, I realized it could be even more useful to focus on paged output so I could generate PDFs directly. C and C++ do not have an HTML-to-PDF library that is not a full web engine. I started coding, imagining I could finish it in a year with a few hours each day. Reality hit fast—HTML and CSS are far more complicated than SVG, and every small detail has unexpected challenges.
I studied KHTML and WebKit to understand how proper HTML/CSS engines work, and the official specs were my best friends. Slowly, things started to come together, and it felt like uncovering a secret world behind what we see in browsers every day.
The most frustrating part has been TableLayout. Tables look simple but handling row and column spans, nested tables, alignment, page breaks, and box calculations was exhausting. I spent countless hours debugging layout bugs that only appeared in certain combinations. It was humbling, frustrating, and oddly satisfying when it finally worked.
I’m still learning and improving, and I hope others find PlutoPrint and PlutoBook as fun and useful as I do.
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Project mention: Recursive macros in C, demystified (once the ugly crying stops) | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-11-05
The CPP does allow quite advanced metaprogramming, it's just so obtuse to use and requires insane hacks so almost nobody does. See one of my favorite projects https://github.com/hirrolot/metalang99
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C CPP discussion
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Faster Asin() Was Hiding in Plain Sight
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Bunny Database
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Show HN: C/C++ Cheatsheet – a modern, practical reference for C and C++
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Recursive macros in C, demystified (once the ugly crying stops)
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Index
What are some of the best open-source CPP projects in C? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | libvips | 11,373 |
| 2 | yugabyte-db | 10,325 |
| 3 | MultiplayerNetworkingResources | 8,536 |
| 4 | ravynos | 6,720 |
| 5 | letos | 6,567 |
| 6 | msquic | 4,711 |
| 7 | glad | 4,523 |
| 8 | webui | 4,141 |
| 9 | bdwgc | 3,482 |
| 10 | InfiniTime | 3,293 |
| 11 | soloud | 2,108 |
| 12 | NumKong | 1,823 |
| 13 | core | 1,803 |
| 14 | Hacking-Windows | 1,580 |
| 15 | StarRuler2-Source | 1,512 |
| 16 | SuiteSparse | 1,498 |
| 17 | librg | 1,481 |
| 18 | IconFontCppHeaders | 1,468 |
| 19 | libtcod | 1,188 |
| 20 | lunasvg | 1,169 |
| 21 | mlibc | 1,073 |
| 22 | metalang99 | 1,068 |
| 23 | zpl | 1,062 |
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