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Top 23 C++ CPP Projects
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ImHex
🔍 A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers, Programmers and people who value their retinas when working at 3 AM.
ImHex (https://imhex.werwolv.net/) is also a really nice Hex editor with tons of plugins (patterns, file support, etc.) and even an embedded language for adding more patterns easily
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Website: clickhouse.com
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Project mention: How to enhance your network with transparent Wake-on-LAN capabilities | dev.to | 2026-05-17
Game streaming — Streaming from your own gaming rig via Moonlight and Sunshine or Apollo? Desomnia ensures the system only runs while someone is actually playing. It also integrates with Duo to start streaming instances when a client connects and stop them when the last session ends.
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If you want to play with software rendering, here's probably the shortest code that will get an ARGB8888 2D array from main memory to the screen efficiently for all platforms using SDL2 in C https://gist.github.com/CoryBloyd/6725bb78323bb1157ff8d4175d... you'll need to do the translation from a 320x200x8-bit palletized framebuffer to ARGB yourself ;)
If you want to get inspired by what can be done with palletized framebuffers check out http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ (click Show Options) and the GDC presentation by the artist https://youtu.be/aMcJ1Jvtef0
With that you can fire up https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter for that classic Deluxe Paint IIe vibe. Or, https://www.aseprite.org/ for something more modern.
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C-Plus-Plus
Collection of various algorithms in mathematics, machine learning, computer science and physics implemented in C++ for educational purposes.
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openpose
OpenPose: Real-time multi-person keypoint detection library for body, face, hands, and foot estimation
OpenPose GitHub Repository - Official implementation and examples
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carbon-lang
Carbon Language's main repository: documents, design, implementation, and related tools. (NOTE: Carbon Language is experimental; see README)
I can't speak about Dart, but Carbon had just barely started development when it was first announced 4 years ago, and is currently presented as an experimental language that is not yet ready for use [0].
0: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang#project-statu...
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It's probably very hardware dependent now, just like it was back then. My calculator opens to interactive in much less than 1 second, but I've got a 9800x3d and fast memory and nvme drive. The other guy saying his start menu takes 8 seconds to open probably has a pretty shit computer.
I definitely got the stupid hourglass in win 95 when trying to open anything, but my understanding of computers at the time was that black ones were faster than beige ones, so my computer was probably shit.
I tried to look up calculator win 95 vids on YouTube, there are a couple. One gets an hourglass - but less than a second, one is instant, one shows the calculator crashing lol.
During this I also found out that Microsoft Calculator is open source: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator
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Project mention: Opinion: Why Redis 8 Cluster Beats Memcached 1.6 for Scalable Apps | dev.to | 2026-05-05
How does Redis 8 Cluster compare to Dragonfly (https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly) for high-throughput caching workloads, and would you consider Dragonfly as an alternative to both Redis and Memcached?
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ulog – logger inspired by spdlog build on top of uvent. Instead of using own thread spawns flushing coroutine.
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modern-cpp-tutorial
📚 Modern C++ Tutorial: C++11/14/17/20 On the Fly | https://changkun.de/modern-cpp/
Project mention: Modern C++ Tutorial: C++ 11/14/17/20 On the Fly | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-28 -
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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Project mention: Floating-Point Printing and Parsing Can Be Simple and Fast | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-01-20
It is possible to compress the table using the technique from Dragonbox (https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt/blob/8b8fccdad40decf68687ec038...) at the cost of some perf. It's on my TODO list for zmij.
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Catch
A modern, C++-native, test framework for unit-tests, TDD and BDD - using C++14, C++17 and later (C++11 support is in v2.x branch, and C++03 on the Catch1.x branch)
To add unit tests into my CLI tool I used Catch2, a modern C++ unit testing framework that makes writing tests easy and quick. It has a nice single-header option that you can drop into a repo, simple REQUIRE / CHECK macros, and flexible test naming and tagging. Also, Catch2 was the library I found interesting when I was looking at open-source projects during the first week of OSD600 cource, so I already liked it.
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BackgroundMusic
Background Music, a macOS audio utility: automatically pause your music, set individual apps' volumes and record system audio.
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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: 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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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++ CPP discussion
C++ CPP related posts
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PGM-index:range searches, deletes, updates using orders of magnitude less space
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Adding 70-language translation to an image API without paying per word
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ConjureEnum: lightweight header-only C++20 enum and typename reflection
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U++ – Cross-Platform App Development Framework
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Stop Killing Games
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Show HN: Pushing a non-blocking C++ web server to 58k req/SEC using kqueue
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Ada: Whatwg-compliant and fast URL parser written in modern C++
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www.saashub.com | 11 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source CPP projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ImHex | 53,792 |
| 2 | ClickHouse | 47,849 |
| 3 | CPlusPlusThings | 43,216 |
| 4 | Sunshine | 37,922 |
| 5 | aseprite | 37,425 |
| 6 | C-Plus-Plus | 34,333 |
| 7 | openpose | 34,056 |
| 8 | carbon-lang | 33,763 |
| 9 | shadPS4 | 31,269 |
| 10 | calculator | 30,955 |
| 11 | dragonfly | 30,604 |
| 12 | spdlog | 28,859 |
| 13 | solidity | 25,644 |
| 14 | modern-cpp-tutorial | 25,430 |
| 15 | tinyrenderer | 23,657 |
| 16 | {fmt} | 23,541 |
| 17 | Catch | 20,426 |
| 18 | BackgroundMusic | 19,013 |
| 19 | rpcs3 | 18,936 |
| 20 | cpp-httplib | 16,557 |
| 21 | OpenRCT2 | 15,811 |
| 22 | Stockfish | 15,753 |
| 23 | Modern-CPP-Programming | 15,735 |
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