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Top 23 C++ programming-language Projects
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carbon-lang
Carbon Language's main repository: documents, design, implementation, and related tools. (NOTE: Carbon Language is experimental; see README)
Project mention: Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++ | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-06-23 -
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supercollider
An audio server, programming language, and IDE for sound synthesis and algorithmic composition.
The visual patching part of Max makes sense when you know the history of the program. It was built for musicians working at the forefront of interfacing MIDI with the power of the more compact mainframe computers of the day (PDP-11 IIRC). The 'programming' was done through a GUI running on the first Macintosh. At first there was no audio processing in Max itself, it was purely for generating and manipulating MIDI data.
You can see the continuation of this 'bare-bones' style of Max with Miller Puckette's continuation of his original work in Pure Data[1] (aka Pd). The nice thing about Pd is that it's open source, so all the scheduling and signal flow logic can be examined and understood. As I understand it, the basics of Pd are comparable to how Max still works under the hood, though no doubt there has been some deviation over the years.
As it is now, Max offers a very smooth interface to the basic paradigm that was established 40 years ago, with many modern advances, but the fundamental idea hasn't changed all that much since it first came out.
If you really hate having to work through a GUI there's always SuperCollider[1] and its many derivatives (Sonic Pi, TidalCycles, etc.). It's nice to have options!
[1] https://msp.ucsd.edu/software.html
[2] https://supercollider.github.io/
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Lute is a general-purpose, Node.js-style runtime for Luau (https://luau.org/) that just hit 1.0.0. It supports filesystem operations, networking, process management, cryptography, and a proper module system, backed by libraries like libuv, curl, and libsodium.
The part we're most excited about: we've exposed APIs for manipulating Luau's syntax tree, so you can write code transformations directly against the language using Lute. This is especially useful if you're working with a large Luau codebase and want powerful tooling.
The team's happy to answer questions about the implementation or design decisions!
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Jank, a Clojure dialect, is playing in the same field (high-performance Clojure).
> Where jank differs from Clojure JVM is that its host is C++ on top of an LLVM-based JIT. This allows jank to offer the same benefits of REPL-based development while being able to seamlessly reach into the native world and compete seriously with JVM's performance.
https://jank-lang.org/
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Project mention: Show HN: Lockstep – A data-oriented programming language | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-03-15
For similar languages / compilers in this area:
1. ISPC [1], the Intel® Implicit SPMD Program Compiler also compiles SIMD programs with branches and other control flow efficiently using predication/masking etc.
2. Futhark [2] compiles nice-looking functional programs into efficent parallel GPU/CPU code.
[1]: https://github.com/ispc/ispc
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Project mention: Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-01-12
I wonder how this compares to the Beef programming language.
https://www.beeflang.org/
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fut
Fusion programming language. Transpiling to C, C++, C#, D, Java, JavaScript, Python, Swift, TypeScript and OpenCL C.
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Ark
ArkScript is a small, fast, functional and scripting language for C++ projects (by ArkScript-lang)
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Project mention: Luau – fast, small, safe, gradually typed scripting language derived from Lua | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-09-18
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completely-unscientific-benchmarks
Naive performance comparison of a few programming languages (JavaScript, Kotlin, Rust, Swift, Nim, Python, Go, Haskell, D, C++, Java, C#, Object Pascal, Ada, Lua, Ruby)
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Project mention: Show HN: I added a package manager to my language (Coi) | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-02-18
Hey HN,
I'm building Coi, a component-based language for reactive apps that compiles to WASM, JS, CSS and HTML. Web-first for now, but eventually cross-platform (and server-side later once things are stable).
I just added a built-in package manager + registry flow. I've always wanted to build a package manager, so doing it inside my own language felt like the perfect excuse. The implementation ended up being pretty straightforward, I kept the registry GitHub-based, so metadata is just JSON, submissions are PRs, and validation runs through CI.
Only one package in the registry right now (mine lol), but getting add/install/upgrade working end-to-end changed how the project feels. Before this it was "compiler/runtime work." Now it actually feels like... idk, something with direction instead of just an experiment :)
Honestly, this is totally a side quest. I probably should have focused more on the language core, but sometimes you just get the motivation to build something random and... go for it lol. And I think it kinda worked out?
The most interesting part was all the ecosystem stuff I never thought about when I was just using a package manager: naming, scope, ownership, squatting. Went in circles trying to figure out how to handle it cleanly, then just stole npm's approach, enforce scoped names. Everything is @someorg/http-client instead of global names like auth or json. It's boring, it's proven, and it avoids the headache of people camping on generic names.
Still super early, but this was a fun milestone and I wanted to share.
If anyone wants to check it out: https://github.com/io-eric/coi
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jule
Simple and safe programming language with first-class C/C++ interoperability and powerful compile-time capabilities
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> Free but not Open Source? Did I miss that?
The miniscript language itself is MIT License:
https://github.com/JoeStrout/miniscript
The Minimicro code doesn't seem to have any license in the repository or code:
https://github.com/JoeStrout/minimicro-sysdisk
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Definitely using AI for the code & commits, probably for the documentation, no idea about the design. For instance, no human would write this commit message, with the preformatted-code-block:
https://github.com/helixlang/helix-lang/commit/4d949efd42b8d...
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cparse
A C++ configurable Expression Parser. Useful as a Calculator or for helping you write your own Programming Language
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xl
A minimalist, general-purpose programming language based on meta-programming and parse tree rewrites
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elena-lang
ELENA is a general-purpose language with late binding. It is multi-paradigm, combining features of functional and object-oriented programming. Rich set of tools are provided to deal with message dispatching : multi-methods, message qualifying, generic message handlers, run-time interfaces
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++ programming-language discussion
C++ programming-language related posts
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Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++
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FreeOberon – Open-Source, Cross-Platform, Free Pascal/Turbo Pascal-Like Language
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Ableton Extensions SDK
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The Green Side of the Lua
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Show HN: Sapphire – A portable language with native UI and 3D vectors
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Empirical, a language for time-series analysis
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Daslang v0.6.0
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 23 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source programming-language projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | carbon-lang | 33,848 |
| 2 | solidity | 25,659 |
| 3 | supercollider | 6,621 |
| 4 | luau | 5,632 |
| 5 | jank | 3,280 |
| 6 | jakt | 2,988 |
| 7 | ispc | 2,900 |
| 8 | Beef | 2,821 |
| 9 | fut | 1,870 |
| 10 | fetlang | 1,502 |
| 11 | Z-Sharp | 730 |
| 12 | Ark | 717 |
| 13 | Pluto | 682 |
| 14 | completely-unscientific-benchmarks | 557 |
| 15 | coi | 555 |
| 16 | jule | 421 |
| 17 | miniscript | 379 |
| 18 | kairo | 367 |
| 19 | cparse | 363 |
| 20 | gdl | 310 |
| 21 | xl | 284 |
| 22 | the_namingless_programming_language | 241 |
| 23 | elena-lang | 240 |
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