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Top 23 C Library Projects
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libcurl
A command line tool and library for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET, TFTP, WS and WSS. libcurl offers a myriad of powerful features
I like curl it's available as a command line tool and is pretty ubiquitous across platforms.
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libgit2
A cross-platform, linkable library implementation of Git that you can use in your application.
That does get intense pretty quickly, if you're generating a source and commit/diff pages for every file * every commit. Probably just single commits would make the most sense and then a source browser for each branch.
That said, JavaScript libgit2 is totally a thing [1], so doing it "properly" in a client app is totally possible.
[1]: https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/issues/4376
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more maddening yet is you can actually mount it as a limited storage device using https://libimobiledevice.org/ under linux, but not MacOs(to my knowledge)
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cute_headers
Collection of cross-platform one-file C/C++ libraries with no dependencies, primarily used for games
Project mention: Collection of one-file C/C++ libraries with no dependencies, primarily for games | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-02-08Since you left this "optimize me" comment here:
https://github.com/RandyGaul/cute_headers/blob/755849fc2819d...
See an optimized quaternion multiplication implementation in SSE by me here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18542894/how-to-multiply...
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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bdwgc
The Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative C/C++ Garbage Collector (bdwgc, also known as bdw-gc, boehm-gc, libgc)
Project mention: Maxima in the browser using Embedded Common Lisp on WASM | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-01-28https://github.com/ivmai/bdwgc/issues/650
Most notably:
```
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unikraft
A next-generation cloud native kernel designed to unlock best-in-class performance, security primitives and efficiency savings.
Jochen Liedtke became a professor in 1999 in Karlsruhe, sadly he passed away only shortly after in 2001. I don't know if his successor Bellosa still does research on L4. There was the L4Ka project which appears to be completed. In the bachelor lecture on OS by him it's not part of the curriculum.
Rittinghaus, alumni of Bellosa, is involved with Unikraft [0], which was featured a couple of times on hn, and is using unikernel technology.
[0] https://unikraft.org/
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Project mention: zlib-ng: zlib replacement with optimizations for "next generation" systems | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-03-16
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libvncserver
LibVNCServer/LibVNCClient are cross-platform C libraries that allow you to easily implement VNC server or client functionality in your program.
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libexpat
:herb: Fast streaming XML parser written in C99 with >90% test coverage; moved from SourceForge to GitHub
Project mention: Recursion kills: The story behind CVE-2024-8176 in libexpat | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-03-14 -
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RGFW
A cross platform lightweight single-header simple-to-use window abstraction library for creating graphical programs or libraries.
Project mention: Is it possible to write plain C iOS app in 2025? | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-14I’ve written a pure C Mac desktop app in 2024 that called the objective-c bindings directly. It is using a modified version of this library https://github.com/ColleagueRiley/RGFW
While I don’t think that library does iOS specifically, you can have a look at the code to see how you can call objective-c from c. Spoiler: doing so kind of sucks, and also the library code isn’t the most elegant thing I’ve seen.
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SaaSHub
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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 Library discussion
C Library related posts
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Perfect Random Floating-Point Numbers
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cmdfx v0.1.3 - Physics Engine in the Terminal
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Show HN: TidesDB – Fast, transactional, durable storage engine
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TidesDB: A modern log structured storage engine
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Show HN: A Database Written in C
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TidesDB: A fast key/value store for modern hardware
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zlib-ng: zlib replacement with optimizations for "next generation" systems
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A note from our sponsor - InfluxDB
www.influxdata.com | 24 May 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source Library projects in C? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | libcurl | 37,967 |
| 2 | FreeRDP | 11,741 |
| 3 | libgit2 | 9,988 |
| 4 | libimobiledevice | 7,020 |
| 5 | lwan | 5,964 |
| 6 | cute_headers | 4,655 |
| 7 | Klib | 4,387 |
| 8 | bdwgc | 3,224 |
| 9 | unikraft | 3,131 |
| 10 | Collections-C | 2,908 |
| 11 | sc | 2,478 |
| 12 | c-ares | 1,956 |
| 13 | sod | 1,772 |
| 14 | zlib-ng | 1,763 |
| 15 | usbmuxd | 1,560 |
| 16 | libssh2 | 1,421 |
| 17 | librg | 1,366 |
| 18 | libvncserver | 1,218 |
| 19 | libexpat | 1,192 |
| 20 | libgphoto2 | 1,122 |
| 21 | lwrb | 1,074 |
| 22 | RGFW | 971 |
| 23 | TurboPFor | 803 |
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