InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now. Learn more →
Top 23 C++ HacktoberFest Projects
-
Windows Terminal
The new Windows Terminal and the original Windows console host, all in the same place!
Microsoft Terminal
-
InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
-
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/seven_segments/
https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~auerswal/ssocr/
https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/ocr-on-camera-image-fo...
https://www.google.com/search?q=home+assistant+ocr+integrati...
https://www.google.com/search?q=esphome+ocr+sensor
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/07/an-esp-will-read-your-meter-...
...start digging around and you'll likely find something. HA has integrations which can support writing to InfluxDB (local for sure, and you can probably configure it for a remote influxdb).
You're looking at 1xRaspberry PI, 1xUSB Webcam, 1x"Power Management / humidity management / waterproof electrical box" to stuff it into, and then either YOLO and DIY to shoot over to your influxdb, or set up a Home Assistant and "attach" your frankenbox as some sort of "sensor" or "integration" which spits out metrics and yadayada...
-
ImHex
🔍 A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers, Programmers and people who value their retinas when working at 3 AM.
Project mention: Ask HN: What are good high information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites) | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-05-08I find Geizhals' filtering options reasonably compact and information dense. https://geizhals.de/?cat=gra16_512&xf=132_16384&pg=1&view=li...
I like the simple table view of RPiLocator. Only a few columns, but lots of rows, no unneeded clutter. https://rpilocator.com/
Not as compact as possible, but at least shows quite some information: GSMArena. It could fit more phones into the comparison table with less whitespace/greyspace though. https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=10386&idPhone...
All sites as viewed on desktop, on mobile this would likely not work out.
I also want to echo the command line tools mention in another comment. GDB's TUI is reasonable for my use, but after some experience this recently posted terminal debugger might be better: https://github.com/al13n321/nnd via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43905185
Also the hex editor I am currently using, despite some problems: https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex
An example of an information dense GUI that might be a bit overwhelming is Ghidra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghidra (page includes a basic screenshot, you can fill your screen(s) with as many sub windows and information panes as you want)
As a side note, while trying to find examples I realized just how few websites there are (any more?) that show a lot of information at the same time. Worst recent offender is YouTube's redesign with only 3 video tiles in a row on a 1440p screen, luckily easily fixed via a ublock rule.
-
Project mention: How to Build a Streaming Deduplication Pipeline with Kafka, GlassFlow, and ClickHouse | dev.to | 2025-05-14
ClickHouse: A fast columnar database. It will be our final destination for clean data. And, for simplicity in this tutorial, we'll cleverly use it as our "memory" or state store to remember which events we've already seen recently.
-
Project mention: Dragonfly: Modern Replacement for Redis and Memcached | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-03-31
Great blog with a lot of good stuff. Loved their Scalable In Memory Dragonfly Swarm post, for example. https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/announcing-dragonfly-swarm-s...
I do wish they did more to show folks how to go deeper in integrating Dragonfly. A readme update 2 years ago talked about a native distributed log that would offer super fast option for integrators. That's the sort of super neat stuff that will entice geeks to come play: not just redis but faster, but having a deeper connection to the machine, to seeing what else is possible. https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly/blame/main/README.m...
-
The best solution is to reduce the amount of allocation calls in your code, then you can use a slow-and-small allocator like emmalloc: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/blob/main/syst...
-
Project mention: Flameshot – Powerful, yet simple to use open-source screenshot software | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-06-11
-
SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
-
Solidity
-
keepassxc
KeePassXC is a cross-platform community-driven port of the Windows application “Keepass Password Safe”.
-
Project mention: SQL powered operating system instrumentation, monitoring, and analytics | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-10
-
Kodi Home Theater Software
Kodi is an award-winning free and open source home theater/media center software and entertainment hub for digital media. With its beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine, it's available for Android, BSD, Linux, macOS, iOS, tvOS and Windows.
-
-
Marlin
Marlin is an optimized firmware for RepRap 3D printers based on the Arduino platform. Many commercial 3D printers come with Marlin installed. Check with your vendor if you need source code for your specific machine.
Project mention: Marlin: Optimized Firmware for 3D Printers Built on Arduino | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-29 -
Project mention: Ask HN: What are the best programmable holiday lights? | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-12-06
https://kno.wled.ge/
Many 'effects' already prepackaged. Plus the ability to schedule time based changes (on/off/change pattern/etc.). Includes a web server to provide "app like" control over a phone or PC. Also includes integrations for several "home control" systems and a http API for programmatic control from another system. Can even synchronize plural controllers into a whole 'net' (note, I've not used this feature yet).
Small ESP32 boards (with wifi capability) such as this example (no affiliation, just an example that works):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09Y8X1GK7
WS2811 LED strings [1] (of which there are an infinite variety) suitable for outdoor use. One example (no affiliation):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYZF1WCR
Suitable power supplies, outdoor weather sealed boxes, and wiring (all left to you to locate).
Willingness to assemble the pieces and some time to do so. Having a soldering iron is helpful here, although one could possibly get by with screw terminal blocks inside weatherproof boxes if need be for many of the 'connections'.
[1] Or other 'programmable LED' strings for which WLED is compatible (it works with numerous different programmable LED standards, browse the WLED website for details).
-
Project mention: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games? | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-20
Internet of Things (IoT): IoT is transforming how we interact with the world and has huge potential in game development. Kids can learn to use smart devices, PCBs, chips, and sensors to create interactive games and "smart" objects (). Here's a resource to get started:
-
-
"Emulator" is the wrong word, but the answer is yes. The word you actually meant was "re-implementation" - writing a completely new, clean-room program which reads Source data files (levels, assets, scripts) and allows the user to play a Source game is perfectly legal.
It is necessary to avoid distributing any copyrighted material, so the user must provide the game assets from a legitimate copy for using the program to be legal. In addition, the 'clean-room' must be maintained by ensuring that no contributors to the re-implementation have ever seen the source code for Source, or they become tainted with forbidden knowledge.
Indeed, it's quite common for beloved old games to be re-implemented on new codebases to allow easy play on modern OS's and at high resolution, etc.
See https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity, https://openrct2.io/, https://github.com/AlisterT/openjazz
-
I built Twins of Caduceus (a snake-based game where you have to control two snakes simultaneously) entirely using Phaser 3. I've had mostly very good experiences with it as a batteries included framework (renderer, asset management, physics, input, etc.)
It's a shame that the map/level editor is a eternal subscription fee with no fallback license. That means you're relegated to either building your own map editor or using something like Tiled.
https://specularrealms.itch.io/the-twins-of-caduceus
https://www.mapeditor.org/
-
Minetest
Luanti (formerly Minetest) is an open source voxel game-creation platform with easy modding and game creation
Project mention: The psychology behind why children are hooked on Minecraft | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-04Yes, and it isn't for every player. Funny story time: I bring online sometime a Luanti [1] server to playtest the game I made in a multiplayer context. One time someone joined and after a few minutes visiting, they asked "So, what is the goal?". I wasn't expecting that. MC may be popular, but one doesn't join a Luanti game server by accident, and most of them are MC- or at least MMORPG-like.
Still, although there's no set goals like in other games, this style of game has to have "affordances" for goals. Even the building activity in MC is not "free", as monsters are there to get in the way of the players' projects.
I also think that the social aspect is crucial, in the sense that having fun building things doesn't last, because one eventually runs out of ideas. Showing to others what you have achieved is an important part of it. Does art exist without an audience ? [2]
I think it is interesting to note that the fact that MC's world is fully editable by players is what drove the choice for the voxel technology, which was the only one allowing it with a normal PC at the time.
[1] https://www.luanti.org/
-
NebulaGraph Database
A distributed, fast open-source graph database featuring horizontal scalability and high availability (by vesoft-inc)
-
Cataclysm-DDA
Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead. A turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world.
CDDA for me at the moment, version 0.H Herbert was released last month.
https://cataclysmdda.org
-
You see, for the past several years I have used many programming languages and many more game frameworks and libraries. Programming languages like Java, C#, C++, and even, sadly, JavaScript (I know...). Game frameworks like LWJGL, SDL2, Raylib, MonoGame, SFML, and many more. Essentially, I have seen it all. Out of all of them, I think SDL2 was closer to what I was looking for, though, Raylib was the one I used the most at the beginning. And the reason I liked SDL more was because it was more"lower-level" than Raylib or SFML. Additionally, it had that C-style of programming that I have always been fond of. However, despite that, I decided to go against any of these libraries.
-
wslg
Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios
Related issues:
https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1008
-
SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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++ HacktoberFest discussion
C++ HacktoberFest related posts
-
I Installed Omakub Five Times So You Can Do It Just Once
-
Ask HN: What are good high information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)
-
Free high-performance cross-platform game engine
-
Modern CMake
-
Creating a React-Native library using New Architecture (JSI, C++)
-
JSON vs Protocol Buffers vs FlatBuffers: A Deep Dive
-
Kickstart insight needed: A new retrofitted C dialect?
-
A note from our sponsor - InfluxDB
www.influxdata.com | 16 May 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source HacktoberFest projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Windows Terminal | 98,097 |
| 2 | tesseract-ocr | 66,835 |
| 3 | ImHex | 48,859 |
| 4 | ClickHouse | 40,657 |
| 5 | dragonfly | 27,923 |
| 6 | emscripten | 26,468 |
| 7 | flameshot | 26,157 |
| 8 | solidity | 24,361 |
| 9 | keepassxc | 23,088 |
| 10 | OSQuery | 22,463 |
| 11 | Kodi Home Theater Software | 19,265 |
| 12 | rpcs3 | 16,849 |
| 13 | Marlin | 16,746 |
| 14 | WLED | 16,212 |
| 15 | IoT-For-Beginners | 15,863 |
| 16 | polybar | 14,567 |
| 17 | OpenRCT2 | 14,300 |
| 18 | tiled | 11,704 |
| 19 | Minetest | 11,422 |
| 20 | NebulaGraph Database | 11,320 |
| 21 | Cataclysm-DDA | 11,242 |
| 22 | SFML | 10,897 |
| 23 | wslg | 10,660 |
Sponsored
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com