markand / awesome-c

Official mirror of http://hg.malikania.fr/awesome-c, updated every hour.

Awesome C

A curated non-opinionated list of opensource C libraries, frameworks, tools and other resources.

Items marked with ⚠️ symbol aren't opensource or covered under or proprietary license.

Libraries

AI

Artificial intelligence.

• sod: embedded computer vision and machine learning library. GPL-3.0-only.

CBOR

Serialization with the CBOR binary format.

• cn-cbor: constrained node implementation of CBOR. MIT.
• libcbor: CBOR implementation for C. MIT.

Compression

Data compression, extracting archives.

• libarchive: multi-format archive compression library. BSD-3-Clause.
• libzip: reading, creating and modifying zip archives. BSD-3-Clause.
• Zstandard: fast compression algorithm. BSD-3-Clause.

Configuration files

Configuration files parsing.

• inih: .ini file parser. BSD-3-Clause.
• libconfuse: small configuration file parsing. ISC.

Databases

Frameworks to access SQL, NoSQL and other engines.

• mariadb C connector: official MariaDB connector. LGPL-2.1-or-later.
• libpq: official PostgreSQL client library. PostgreSQL.
• sqlite: file based SQL engine, most used in the world. Public domain.
• unqlite: embeddable NoSQL library. BSD-2-Clause.

Game programming

• Allegro: cross-platform library mainly aimed at video game and multimedia programming. BSD-3-Clause.
• CSFML: official C binding for SFML. Zlib.
• SDL2: cross platform development library with audio, video, input, OpenGL and more. Zlib.

Graphical user interfaces

Graphical user interface toolkits to create end user applications.

• EFL: enlightenment foundation library. LGPL-2.1-only.
• GTK: GNOME graphical toolkit. LGPL-2.1-or-later.
• nuklear: platform agnostic immediate mode UI library. MIT.

JSON

Libraries to decode, parse and generate JSON.

• jansson: encode, decode and manipulate JSON data. MIT.
• jsmn: allocationless JSON decoder. MIT.
• json-c: a JSON implementation in C. MIT.

Networking

Libraries for networking, event loops, file transfer and such.

• curl: swiss-army knife for multi protocols file transfer library. CURL.
• libev: high performance event loop library. BSD-2-Clause.
• libevent: event notification library with main loop abstraction. BSD-3-Clause.
• nanomsg: socket library. MIT.
• zeromq: universal messaging library. LGPL-3.0-or-later.

Scripting languages

Scripting languages designed to be embedded into C to extend your applications.

• Duktape: ECMAScript 5.1 engine with an API similar to Lua. MIT.
• Gravity: simple language with a Swift like syntax. MIT.
• Lua: embeddable scripting language. MIT.
• Wren: class-based scripting language. MIT.

Strings

Libraries and frameworks to create and manipulate safe strings in C.

• libbuf: minimal set of 13 functions to manipulate strings. ISC.
• sds: Simple Dynamic Strings library for C. BSD-2-Clause.

Text manipulation

Other text manipulation that consists of encoding and decoding to different formats.

• libbase64: minimal set of 6 functions to encode and decode base64 data. ISC.
• mustache4c: C mustache parser library. MIT.
• msgpack: binary serialization format inspired by JSON. [BSL-1.0][license-boost].

Unicode

Handling of unicode character classes, conversion between unicode representations (e.g. UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32) and more.

• icu: international components for Unicode. ICU.
• libunicode: conversion and classifications in only 18 functions. ISC.
• utf8.h: header only set of functions for UTF-8 strings. Unlicense.
• utf8proc: library for handling UTF-8 strings. MIT.

Web frameworks

List of libraries that let you create websites in CGI or as HTTP servers.

• facil.io: web application framework. MIT.
• kcgi: opinionated minimal CGI/FastCGI library. ISC.
• kore: web application framework. ISC.

XML

Libraries to decode, parse and generate XML.

• expat: stream oriented (SAX) library. MIT.
• libxml2: document oriented parsing library. MIT.

Tools

Set of tools, IDE and code helpers.

Compilers

Obvious compilers that compile your code.

• cproc: C11 compiler based on QBE. ISC.
• GCC: GNU Compiler Collection. GPL-3.0-or-later.
• LLVM: comprehensive toolchain for various languages, cross platform and cross-compilation built-in. NCSA.

Environment

Set of environment applications and utilities.

• MSYS2: easy to use environment for windows including gcc, clang and the Arch Linux's pacman package manager. ¹.
• ⚠️ Visual Studio: reference IDE for Microsoft Windows.

Build systems

List of build systems.

• BSD Make: portable implementation of NetBSD make. BSD-2-Clause.
• CMake: cross platform build system that generates IDE and build system files. BSD-3-Clause.
• GNU Make: GNU variant of the POSIX make utility. GPL-3.0-or-later.
• Meson: build system aimed at speed. Apache-2.0.
• Premake: build utility based on Lua. BSD-3-Clause.
• xmake: cross platform build utility based on Lua. Apache-2.0.

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Footnotes

1. No license applicable because the project may consist of dozens of different individual elements. ↩