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Top 23 OpenGL Open-Source Projects
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Ligatures are a renderer issue, so using alacritty as a lib wouldn't have this issue (it does demonstrate their hardline stance). Another example that would translate is how long it took them to support disambiguation of key combinations: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6378 (2019-2023). Of course, the maintainers are free to do whatever they want with the project - but such things do make alacritty-as-a-lib an exceptionally bad choice for situations where you want things to just work.
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kitty
If you live in the terminal, kitty is made for you! Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based.
Terminal: I use Kitty. I have tabs, splits, clipboard bindings, quick access terminal, and a few custom keybindings. It is fast, it works well on Wayland, and it does not get in my way.
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I got this itch too when I came across tinyrenderer [1] and worked through the early lessons through shading, but didn't quite finish the texture mapping yet [2]. It was fun to work in pure C from first principles, even side-questing to write a simple TGA file reader and writer.
I'd be very interested to see your tutorial when it's done!
[1] https://haqr.eu/tinyrenderer
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filament
Filament is a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, macOS, and WebGL2 (by google)
Project mention: Toyota Fluorite: "console-grade" Flutter game engine | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-02-11It does look like Filament has a web target:
https://github.com/google/filament
but if they're targeting embedded systems, maybe they haven't prioritized a public web demo yet. If the bulk of the project is actually in C++, making a web demo probably involves a whole WASM side-quest. I suspect there's a different amount of friction between "I wanna open source this cool project we're doing" and "I wanna build a rendering target we won't use to make the README look better."
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3d-game-shaders-for-beginners
🎮 A step-by-step guide to implementing SSAO, depth of field, lighting, normal mapping, and more for your 3D game.
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Project mention: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-10
> If someone can’t write their own Agent.md for a project how are they going to validate the auto-completed text?
> This strikes me as the ideal LLM first contribution/PR, a file explaining the projects standards and testing and structure.
Why should the project maintainers write such a file, when the info already exists within the README? It is duplicated work at best, and a definitive sign of the incapabilities of the agent to properly parse the project's contribution guidelines.
https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/blob/master/README.md#contrib...
https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/wiki/Coding-Style
https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3/wiki/Developer-Information
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Project mention: Getting Started with 2D Games Using Pyxel (Part 1): Introduction | dev.to | 2026-01-05
Pyxel is a game engine that makes it easy to handle things like character rendering, movement, and collision detection. It is especially recommended for those who love retro-style games.
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Project mention: We Built the First Pure Go DXIL Generator — Because Optimizing the Wrong Path Wasn't Enough | dev.to | 2026-04-05
Rust's naga shader compiler has had an open issue for DXIL backend since 2020. Six years later, it's still marked as future work. The Rust team called it "a lot of work and a long way away."
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bgfx
Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library.
Project mention: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-02-18 -
Project mention: OpenRCT2 v0.5.1 "Swamp Castle" released Last version to support Windows 7 | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-30
You can follow the link to the cask code on GitHUb and the line disabling will (usually) leave a clear reason. In this case, because of Gatekeeper/codesigning because that costs money https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/issues/15879?utm_source...
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> There are frameworks and libraries that handle 100% of clipboard OS specifics
They're sufficient in many cases, but you'll still sometimes need the control of working with COM/etc. directly, and those libraries don't fully save you from platform-specific bugs (e.g: https://github.com/glfw/glfw/issues/2644).
> the app in question has no use for system clipboard in the first place
What do you expect to happen when you copy some text from an external editor into a text field?
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The most popular library for point cloud processing in Python is Open3D.
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OpenFrameworks
openFrameworks is a community-developed cross platform toolkit for creative coding in C++.
This reminds me of OpenFrameworks [0], which provides very similar framework style functionality like Nannou but for C++.
[0]: https://openframeworks.cc/
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Project mention: Show HN: FluidCAD – Parametric CAD with JavaScript | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-10
I'll throw my hat in on the feedback... looks great!
https://github.com/openscad/openscad/pull/4478#issuecomment-...
My pet use case is: "My naive approach as a programmer would be: `pen := new Pen(q,r,s,t); box := new Box( pen.L, pen.W, pen.H )`" along with being able to sometimes work with the whole pen, and sometimes touch the pen vs. the cap separately.
Since it's all javascript, it seems like there's a chance that this use case would work (ie: `p = Pen(...).render().getWidth()`)? Additionally, your intermediate step screenshots really makes it seem like a SketchUp-ish GUI would be perfect! Obviously a ton of work, but SketchUp's "grab face + extrude / push", but if it were "sticky" to the underlying parametric components seems like it'd be an awesome combo... something like group/components, but backed by code instead of GUI-only (or GUI-centric) editing.
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Project mention: From Windows to Linux Mint in 2025: Testing Black Myth: Wukong with DLSS vs FSR + Frame Generation | dev.to | 2025-07-27
MangoHud: https://github.com/flightlessmango/MangoHud
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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SuperTux 0.7.0
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 7 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source OpenGL projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | alacritty | 64,514 |
| 2 | kitty | 33,320 |
| 3 | raylib | 33,258 |
| 4 | tinyrenderer | 23,657 |
| 5 | filament | 20,108 |
| 6 | 3d-game-shaders-for-beginners | 19,497 |
| 7 | rpcs3 | 18,894 |
| 8 | pyxel | 17,517 |
| 9 | wgpu | 17,298 |
| 10 | bgfx | 17,120 |
| 11 | OpenRCT2 | 15,784 |
| 12 | GLFW | 15,068 |
| 13 | openage | 14,239 |
| 14 | Open3D | 13,669 |
| 15 | SFML | 11,886 |
| 16 | GLM | 10,992 |
| 17 | Craft | 10,985 |
| 18 | renderdoc | 10,753 |
| 19 | OpenFrameworks | 10,384 |
| 20 | openscad | 9,513 |
| 21 | android-gpuimage | 9,157 |
| 22 | olive | 9,040 |
| 23 | MangoHud | 8,674 |
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