awesome-c

Build tool designed to avoid complex configurations

Extensible package of M4 macros that produce shell scripts to automatically configure software source code packages. Part of the Autotools

Tool for automatically generating files compliant with the GNU Coding Standards. Requires the use of Autoconf. Part of the Autotools

Tools for cross-platform building, testing, and packaging

Build system, designed to be easier than make. Understands C build rules implicitly

Generic library support script. Part of the Autotools

Extremely fast, user-friendly build system. Based on Ninja

Premake

Build script generator for toolsets like Visual Studio, Xcode, or GNU Make

An easier, more reliable and faster way to build software

Ninja

Small, simple build system with a focus on speed

Build system for various operating systems and targets

Build system created and used by Facebook

Modern build tool for software projects

Build system included with the Qt Framework

Cross-platform build utility based on lua

C compiler for LLVM. Supports C11

Fully-verified C compiler. Supports almost all of C89

Provides a C compiler as part of its compiler set. Supports C11 and OpenMP

Venerable C compiler. Supports C99

Tiny C Compiler; a small, fast C compiler. Supports C99 (except complex types)

Compiler for a variant of the C language, for single program, multiple data programming

Compiler cache designed to speedup recompilation

Yasm Modular Assembler Project

A C library for reading, creating, and modifying zip archives

Very fast data compression library

Massively-spiffy yet delicately-unobtrusive compression library

Patent free, high quality data compressor

Fast Compression algorithm

snappy

Fast compression library (implementation in C++, native bindings to C)

Fast real-time compression algorithm

brotli

Generic lossless compression algorithm based on LZ77, Huffman coding and 2nd order context modelling

Fast compression library

pixz

Pixz (pronounced pixie) is a parallel, indexing version of

Secure communication library, implementing SSL, TLS and DTLS

General-purpose cryptography library, with a range of available ciphers. and

Implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols, and also includes a cryptography library

Modern and easy-to-use crypto library

Fairly comprehensive, modular and portable cryptographic toolkit

Another crypto implementation for C

Modernized fork of OpenSSL

Library for a high-performance embedded database for key-value data

Hiredis

Minimalistic client library for Redis

LMDB

Ultra-fast, ultra-compact key-value embedded data store

Robust, scalable and reliable SQL server, designed to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL

High-performance client library for

Powerful object-relational database system

Set of tools and a C library for accessing human-editable, plaintext database files called recfiles

Advanced key-value store

Modern, embeddable key-value database

Self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine with a C interface

Self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional NoSQL engine with a C interface

Open source neural network framework written in C and CUDA. It is fast, easy to install, and supports CPU and GPU computation

Generates documentation of C programs in either LaTeX, HTML, RTF or SGML

Modestly-tagged markup language that can be used to generate a range of formats

The de-facto standard tool for generating C documentation from annotated sources. Can generate a large range of formats

Tool for generating C documentation from annotated sources. Has support for the Autotools. or

The GNOME IDE

Hackable text editor for the 21st century

Extensible, configurable IDE supporting C

Cross-platform IDE

IDE written in Java

Very small and fast IDE

The KDE IDE

Cross-platform IDE written with C++ and Qt, part of the Qt SDK. Supports Clang Code Model

Code editing, redefined. Visual Studio Code

RTOS for microcontrollers that makes small, low-power edge devices easy to program

RTOS with complete development environment (HAL, drivers, support files, and tools)

Connect low-cost, low power microcontrollers to the Internet

Scalable real-time RTOS supporting multiple hardware architectures, optimized for resource constrained devices

Real-time multi-threading operating system that supports a range of devices that are typically found in the Internet of Things

Designed to emulate a POSIX-compatible environment extensively under Windows

Minimalist environment for C development on Windows with 64 bit support

Apache Portable Runtime; another library of cross-platform utility functions

Collection of common algorithms and data structures for C

C Macro Collections

Header only, macro generated, generic and type-safe Collections in C

The Common Pipeline Library; a set of libraries designed to be a comprehensive, efficient and robust software toolkit

Large collection of useful data structures and functions

Library of utility functions and structures, designed to be portable, efficient and powerful

Modern and easy-to-use VFS API

Object-oriented system and object model for C

libnih

Lightweight library of C functions and structures

Small library of basic utilities, including memory allocation, string manipulation and logging

Large library of utilities, featuring data structures, among other things. or

Simple and powerful C library, designed as a replacement for GLib while focusing on being small and light. (similar to )

stb

Range of single-file libraries for C

Safe Real-Time library for C

Corange

Game engine in pure C

Modified version of the Quake2 engine

The Quake3 engine, freed at last

Portable, lightweight, plugin-based, data-driven, 2D-oriented game engine

Quake

The Quake engine

Quake2

The Quake2 engine

Engine designed for FPS games

Cross-platform, video game development and multimedia library

Fast and lightweight 2D game physics library

Binding for in C

Alternative to the OpenGL Utility Toolkit. Allows the creation and management of windows with OpenGL contexts

Multi-platform library for creating windows with OpenGL contexts

Cross-platform audio library with a wide variety of outputs

The reference frontend for

Cross-platform development library designed to provide low-level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick and graphics hardware via OpenGL. SDL2 is the most current version

Simple and easy-to-use library to learn videogames programming

Small and lightweight implementations of common algorithms and data structures

-2D graphics library. or

Cogl

GPU graphics and utilities API

UI library based on OpenGL

Library for reading and writing gif images

heman

Tiny library of image utilities dealing with height maps, normal maps, distance fields and the like

libcaca

ASCII renderer for terminal-based interfaces

Small, portable library for high-quality conversion of RGBA images to 8-bit indexed colour images

Faster library for reading and writing JPEG files

The official PNG reference library

Function library for rasterizing 2D vector graphics

mozjpeg

Improved JPEG encoder

Industry adopted 2D and 3D graphics API. More resources at

Industry adopted 2D and 3D graphics API for mobile and embedded devices

Graphic and compute standard for industry requiring system safety certification

Explicit graphic and compute API for modern cross-platform development. More resources at

Cross-platform widget toolkit

Another cross-platform widget toolkit

Basic widget toolkit. Part of Tcl/Tk

Widget toolkit designed for the XWindow system

nuklear

Single-header ANSI C gui library

libui

Simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library

LCUI

Small C library for building user interfaces with C, XML and CSS

jwHash

Fast hashtable implementation

Extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm

libcrc

Multi platform CRC library

murmur

C implementation of MurMur Hashing

t1ha

Fast Positive Hash library

Modern Computer Vision Library

C library for encoding, decoding and manipulating JSON

Minimalistic JSON parser

json-c

Library for working with JSON

parson

Lightweight JSON library written in C

WJElement

Advanced JSON manipulation library, with support for JSON Schema

Fast C JSON streaming parser library

(a little dated, but most of it is still valid and useful)

(online PDF)

(video)

(for the OpenMP3 standard)

Full reference book for C99

Concise reference book for C99

The original book on C, by its creators

Complete tutorial on programming in C11

Excellent book to learn the basics of C

'Head-first' style book for learning C

Very good programming book on C

In-depth resource on pointers in C

Book for using ZeroMQ with C

Interesting, in-depth and look at the innards of C

Suite of macros to implement advanced features like default function arguments, scope-bound resources, etc. (Requires C99)

General purpose malloc(3) implementation that emphasizes fragmentation avoidance and scalable concurrency support, commonly used in production systems

Doug Lea's malloc(3) implementation, useful for academic and research purposes

A Fast, Scalable, and Memory-efficient Malloc for Linux, Windows, Mac, and Solaris

An EXTREMELY FAST portable thread caching malloc(3) implementation written in C

rpmalloc

Cross platform, lock-free memory allocator

Complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. or

Framework for audio and visual media

Simple PNG image decoder and encoder, requiring no other dependencies

GNOME HTTP client/server library. Uses GObject

Music-playing library. Compile with to not have the music player

Library for cross-platform, real-time audio input and output. Has a range of back-ends

Compiler of ASN.1 specifications into C source code

High-level binding for ZeroMQ

Advanced, easy-to-use, asynch-capable DNS client library and utilities

Implementation of the Simple Authentication and Security Layer and a few common SASL mechanism

Secure communication library, implementing SSL, TLS and DTLS

gumbo-parser

HTML5 parsing library in C99

http-parser

HTTP request/response parser

Library to simplify DNS programming

Client-side URL transfer library, supporting a wide range of formats

Mail library providing an efficient network for IMAP, SMTP, POP and NNTP

Yet another event loop

Cross-platform asynchronous I/O

Event loop replacement for network servers

Generic Security Service

Library to add basic web server capabilities to an application or embedded device

Implementation of the Stringprep, Punycode and IDNA specifications

Small C library that makes it easy to run an HTTP server as part of another application

Sagui is a cross-platform C library which helps to develop web servers or frameworks

libvldmail

Your friendly e-mail address validation library

Experimental, scalable, high-performance HTTP server

Embedded web server for C

MQTT-C

Portable MQTT C client for embedded systems and PCs alike

nanomsg

C-based implementation of ZeroMQ

Implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols, and also includes a cryptography library

SIP implementation in C without additional dependencies

pig

Linux packet crafting tool

s2n

C99 implementation of the TLS/SSL protocols, designed to be simple, fast and with security as a priority

socket99

C99 wrapper for the BSD sockets API

Communication platform, designed to be a Skype-killer

twitc

Mini C library for interacting with the Twitter OAuth API

librg

Library for building simple and elegant cross-platform mmo client-server solutions

dyad

Asynchronous networking library

h2o

Optimized HTTP/1, HTTP/2 high performance server/library

Microframework for C based on GLib

C library to create simple HTTP servers and Web Applications

Easy to use, scalable and secure web application framework for writing web APIs in C

KLone is a fully-featured, multiplatform, web application development framework

Duda I/O is an event-driven and high performant web services framework written in C

Library for statistical and scientific computing

Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software

Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms; a set of routines that provide vector and matrix operations

Library with routines to evaluate cumulative density functions fo a variety of standard probability distributions. Also can compute one parameter of the CDF given the others. (No license given)

Pure-C Math library with a great variety of mathematical functions and CMake build support. Seeks to be close to C89/C90 compliant for portability

Library for multidimensional numerical integration

The Fastest Fourier Transform in the West; a highly-optimized fast Fourier transform routine

Fast Library for Number Theory; a library supporting arithmetic with numbers, polynomials, power series and matrices, among others

GNU Linear Programming Kit; a package designed for solving large-scale linear programming, mixed integer programming and other related problems

GNU Multple Precision Arithmetic Library; a library for arbitrary-precision arithmetic. and

Library for complex number arithmetic

Library for arbitrary-precision floating-point arithmetic. or

Portable mathematics library for multi-precision rational interval arithmetic

The GNU Scientific Library; a sophisticated numerical library

Library for creating and manipulating large graphs

Very simple fast Fourier transform library

C interface to

Computer algebra system for number theory; includes a compiler to C

Suite of data structures and routines for scalable parallel solution of scientific applications modelled by partial differential equations

Library that handles various discrete and continuous probability density functions

Very fast, SIMD-optimized mathematical library

Small library for channel constructs for inter-thread communication

Concurrency primitives, safe memory reclamation mechanisms and non-blocking data structures

Go-style concurrency in C

Structured concurrency in C

Another implementation of MPI

Set of C pragmas designed to allow for easy parallelization of code

OpenMPI

Message passing interface implementation

Portable implementation for non-preemptive priority-based scheduling for multiple threads of execution

The POSIX thread library

Software library for the solution of large, sparse eigenvalue problems on parallel computers

Portable, small implementation of the C11 threads API

hammer

Parser combinators for binary formats

iniparser

Parser for files

libconfini

Yet another INI parser

YAML 1.1 parser and emitter

mpc

Parser combinator library

libucl

Universal configuration library parser

Implementation of regexes identical to that of Perl 5

regexp4

Simple and complete implementation of regular expressions with its own sintax

SLRE

Super Light Regular Expression library; a very small implementation of a subset of Perl regex syntax

sregex

Non-backtracking NFA/DFA-based Perl-compatible regex engine library

TRE

POSIX-compliant, feature-full regex library

binn

Binary serialization format meant to be compact, fast and easy-to-use

c-capnproto

Implementation of the Cap'n Proto serialization protocol

cmp

Implementation of the serialization protocol

C implementation of the Avro data serialization system

mpack

Another implementation of the serialization protocol

netstring-c

Netstring encoder and decoder

protobuf-c

Implementation of Google Protocol Buffer in C

External Data Representation; a standard for data serialization

Modelled after Perl's CPAN, this is a big collection of C code that does stuff. The full list is

clib

Something of a package manager for C. Comes with a

Collection of common GNU code

Collection of libraries doing various things

Bionic

Google's C standard library, developed for Android

C standard library designed for the smallest possible binaries

The GNU C Library; an implementation of the C standard library

Standard C library, compatible with POSIX 2008 and C11. Designed for static linking

The Better String Library. and

International Components for Unicode; a library for Unicode support

Library for manipulating Unicode strings in C

Text conversion library. or

SDS

Simple Dynamic Strings; a library for handling C strings in a simpler way, but one that is compatible with normal C string functions. Available via

Compressor for small text strings

smaz

Efficient string compression library

utf8.h

Single header utf8 string functions

utf8proc

Small, clean library for processing UTF-8 Unicode data

Very simple unit testing framework

Unit testing framework for C

Mock/stub generator for C

Unit testing framework with support for mock objects

KISS, non-intrusive C test framework

Another unit testing framework for C

Cutest

Library for unit testing with memory leak detection (Linux, freeBSD and Windows)

minunit

Minimal unit testing framework for C

Small but full-featured unit testing framework for C with no dependencies

Simple unit testing framework for C

linter-clang

Lint C code in Atom, using Clang

linter-gcc

Lint C code in Atom, using GCC

Collection of Emacs Development Environment Tools; designed to provide IDE-like features to Emacs. Built-in

Flycheck

Modern syntax checking. For C, it can use either GCC or Clang as a back-end

Yasnippet

Template system, with C templates for common code snippets

Syntastic

Syntax checking and linting

Code completion engine for Vim

Fast and small automatic source code formatter that supports C

address-sanitizer

Fast memory error detector

Modern dependency manager for C

c

Compile and execute C "scripts" in one go on the command line. Also has shebang support

c99sh

Run C files using hash-bang

C Bounded Model Checker; a tool for verification of array bounds, pointer safety and user-specified assertions

Online service to translate C declarations into English and vice versa

Graphs include dependencies in a C project using Graphviz

Tool for measuring the complexity of C source code

Source code analyzer and refactoring browser for collections of C programs

Graphical front-end for a range of command-line debuggers

The GNU Project debugger; a debugger for C

RAD tool to enable quick development of GTK+ GUIs

GNU Make Standard Library; a collection of additional functionality for GNU Make

Source code tagging tool which works with C

Performance analysis tool. Part of GNU binutils

Converts source code to formatted text with nice highlighting

include-what-you-use

Helps find unecessary inclusions and make suggestions for fixing them. Based on LLVM/Clang (and only works with it)

Formats C source code automatically to make it easier to read. Also converts from one style of source to another

Debugger that records non-deterministic executions to allow for deterministic debugging

Very fast, file-based, cross-platform build system

Removes #ifdef and #if directives with their delimited text without touching any other part of the file. and

Range of dynamic analysis tools, including a leak checker

ApeTagLibs

C library for working with APEv2 tags

Library for manipulating binary object files. Part of GNU binutils

The C Framework for OpenCL; a cross-platform object-oriented framework for developing and benchmarking projects. or

CommonMark

C implementation of the CommonMark spec

CException

C implementation of exceptions

docopt.c

C implementation of a command-line option parser

Another foreign function interface library

Fast Artifical Neural Network library; an implementation of neural networks

C library that provides a graph-based intermediate representation, optimizations and assembly code generation suitable for use in compilers. Comes with an example C front-end under the same license

Genann

Simple neural network library in C

Library of random-number generation routines. or

In-band and out-of-band IPMI implementation

Perfect hash function generator, given a list of strings. Outputs C code

Collection of libraries for building foreign function interfaces

gperftools

Collection of utilities for measuring and improving performance

huffandpuff

Minimal Huffman encoder and decoder

kdtree

Simple library for working with KD-trees

Efficient, general-purpose framework for dynamic software updating

Library containing a range of self-balancing binary trees

libbson

BSON utility library

Library introducing higher-level programming to C

libffi

Portable foreign-function interface library

Pure C implementation of Git

libimobiledevice

Cross-platform protocol library to communicate with iThings. or

libnfc

Platform-independent Near-Field Communication library

libPhenom

Deprecated, here for archival purposes. Eventing framework for building high-scalability and high-performance systems

Coloured terminal UI library

nope.c

C-language-based, ultra-light software platform for scalable server-side and networking applications (think node.js for C programmers)

pbc

Protocol buffers library

rabbitmq-c

Client library for

DSL for state machines that compiles to C

Tinyexpr

Tiny recursive-descent parser, compiler and evaluation engine for simple mathematical expressions

Hash table implementation, allowing existing structures to be stored in a hash table easily

cpu_features

A cross platform C99 library to get cpu features at runtime

pblog

Small, low overhead, structured logging library intended for logging formware events

libelf

ELF object file access library in C

Portable C preprocessor

Generic access to USB devices

Userspace library to interact with ALSA

Capstone

Dissasembly/disassembler framework

Stream-oriented XML parser

Standards-compliant, portable XML parser

mini-xml

Small XML reading and writing library. No dependencies aside from C standard library