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Top 23 C X86 Projects
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> You claimed "Ventoy adds repos". It does not. It is incapable of doing anything of the kind. It does not run on the installed system. It does not modify the boot media in any way. This is demonstrable and verifiable.
It literally adds an rdinit to the kernel boot line that hijacks the boot process and messes with it in a shell script. This is demonstrable and verifiable: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/blob/master/IMG/cpio/ventoy...
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Unicorn Engine
Unicorn CPU emulator framework (ARM, AArch64, M68K, Mips, Sparc, PowerPC, RiscV, S390x, TriCore, X86)
Project mention: Capstone – lightweight multi-platform, multi-architecture disassembly framework | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-06-02As one who helped improved Capstone and its even more wonderful partner, Unicorn, I actually found an exploit in QEMU using Capstone/Unicorn.
Unicorn is a nearly-true software-based CPU emulator for ARM, AArch64, M68K, Mips, Sparc, PowerPC, RiscV, S390x, TriCore, X86 architecture.
This pair-up is arguably the best set of software tools out there.
QEMU? No worry, that's way back in QEMU v1.4 days (Intel IMUL lb/DWORD OPC_IMUL_GvEvlb opcode)
Fabrice fixed it then and is still blazing at QEMU 10.0 now. Ain't he awesome?
https://github.com/unicorn-engine/unicorn/issues/364
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capstone
Capstone disassembly/disassembler framework for ARM, ARM64 (ARMv8), Alpha, BPF, Ethereum VM, HPPA, LoongArch, M68K, M680X, Mips, MOS65XX, PPC, RISC-V(rv32G/rv64G), SH, Sparc, SystemZ, TMS320C64X, TriCore, Webassembly, XCore and X86.
Project mention: Capstone – lightweight multi-platform, multi-architecture disassembly framework | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-06-02 -
Project mention: A self-powered computer in actual credit-card size (~1mm thick) | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-23
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stress-ng
This is the stress-ng upstream project git repository. stress-ng will stress test a computer system in various selectable ways. It was designed to exercise various physical subsystems of a computer as well as the various operating system kernel interfaces.
Funny that it talks about matrixprod, which I think is not that relevant as benchmark — unless you care about x87 performance specifically. I recently sent a pull request to try to address that in a generic manner: https://github.com/ColinIanKing/stress-ng/pull/561
Yet I'm still surprised by this benchmark. On both Zen2 and Zen4 in my tests (5900X is Zen3), matrixprod still benefits from hyperthreading and scales, unlike what the article shows.
All of this is tangential of course, as I'd tend to agree that CPU utilization% is just an imprecise metric and should only be used as a measure of "is something running".
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bddisasm
bddisasm is a fast, lightweight, x86/x64 instruction decoder. The project also features a fast, basic, x86/x64 instruction emulator, designed specifically to detect shellcode-like behavior.
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Project mention: He Chunhui's Tiny386 Turns an ESP32-S3 into a Fully-Functional 386-Powered PC | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-11-08
Super cool work! Here's the emulator source: https://github.com/hchunhui/tiny386
I wonder what the "effective" clock of the emulated CPU is, maybe we could run Speedsys or Landmark under DOS on it to see how it fares against a real 386. I happen to have a top-end 386 at 40MHz, 16MB FPM, and S3 801 VGA, but it's not quite fast enough to "enjoy" Win95 for me. :)
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SHA-Intrinsics
SHA-1, SHA-256 and SHA-512 compression functions using Intel, ARMv8 and Power8 SHA intrinsics
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XTulator
XTulator is a portable, open source x86 PC emulator currently supporting the 8086 instruction set and 80186 extensions.
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).
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Index
What are some of the best open-source X86 projects in C? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ventoy | 77,152 |
| 2 | reactos | 17,626 |
| 3 | Unicorn Engine | 9,020 |
| 4 | capstone | 8,827 |
| 5 | 86Box | 4,302 |
| 6 | zydis | 4,251 |
| 7 | box86 | 3,781 |
| 8 | tilck | 3,100 |
| 9 | stress-ng | 2,671 |
| 10 | likwid | 1,910 |
| 11 | SmallerC | 1,554 |
| 12 | bddisasm | 1,037 |
| 13 | halfix | 769 |
| 14 | tiny386 | 577 |
| 15 | mini-c | 531 |
| 16 | mos | 391 |
| 17 | simple-pt | 356 |
| 18 | iso14229 | 343 |
| 19 | bread | 325 |
| 20 | mass | 298 |
| 21 | anticuckoo | 297 |
| 22 | SHA-Intrinsics | 227 |
| 23 | XTulator | 180 |
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