Blessed C List
Tooling
Tools you may need throughout the development process: development, building, testing, and debugging.
About Development
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Standard Library | glibc The most widely used C standard library. musl Light-weight and efficient C standard library, designed for static linking. uClibc-ng Another light-weight C standard library, designed for embedded systems. |
| Package Manager | Conan A C/C++ package manager, with a large repository. vcpkg Package manager from Microsoft. Mainly for Visual Studio, but works on Un*x too. pkg-config A helper tool for using libraries. Not really a package manager, but widely used to help find libraries installed on a system. |
| Language Server | clangd Adds smart features to your editor: code completion, compile errors, go-to-definition and more. |
| Linting | Cppcheck A static analysis tool for common C/C++ code problems. clang-tidy A clang-based C/C++ linter. The default linter for clangd plugin and CLion IDE. |
About Building
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Toolchain | GCC C Compiler Widely used compiler for Un*x system. Clang A C frontend that compiles C into LLVM IR. Also very popular. MSVC Microsoft’s C compiler toolchain, mainly for Windows. |
| Build System | Autotools One of the most widely used build systems (configure && make). CMake The de-facto standard for building modern C/C++ project. Note: Also check meson and SCons, which are not so popular but have their own advantages. A comparison can be found here. |
| Documentation Generator | Doxygen The most widely used documentation generator for C. Default theme looks not very attractive but can be customized. |
About Testing
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Benchmarking | hyperfine Tool for benchmarking compiled binaries (similar to unix time command but better). |
| Testing | Criterion Simple yet powerful unit testing framework, C99-compatible. Unity Another simple unit testing framework, focusing on embedded systems (8-bit to 64-bit systems supported). |
About Debugging
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Automatic Checker | Sanitizers AddressSanitizer, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer, MemorySanitizer to detect runtime problems. Valgrind A tool suite for debugging and profiling, having similar features to sanitizers. Both are very popular and time-tested. |
| Manual Debugger | GDB The most widely used debugger by GNU for C, as well as Asm, D, Fortran, Go, Rust, OpenCL, and many other languages. |
Common
Very common tools that every C developer should know about.
General
General use case.
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Random Number | libsodium libsodium, as a modern and easy-to-use crypto library, also provides a secure random number generator. shishua Very fast PRNG (non-cryptographic), claimed to be faster than most implementations. Inactively maintained. |
| UUIDs | libuuid Generates UUIDs. Part of the e2fsprogs (i.e. ext2 filesystem tools) package. Unmaintained for a long time. IdGenerator Fast SnowFlake-based unique ID generator, having C port. Actively maintained but documentation is Chinese only. |
| Gzip (de)compression | zlib Official zlib library. Use it if you need great portability and run on old systems. zlib-ng A fork of zlib with many patches for modern hardware and OS. Use it if you need performance. |
| Logging | zlog High-performance & thread safe logging library. POSIX/Windows compatible. syslog GNU C library’s syslog helper functions. Available on most Un*x systems, and should be used if you are writing a OS-related tool. |
| HTTP Request | libcurl The most widely used client-side URL transfer library. |
| Resource Embedding | incbin A simple macro library to embed arbitrary files into source code. |
| All-In-One Utility | Sometimes you may want to use a library that does many things in a uniform and portable way. Here are some of them. To keep the list brief, all features cannot be listed here. GLib A general-purpose utility library by GNOME. Widely used. APR Apache Portable Runtime, updating infrequently but stable. gnulib A collection of subroutines used by many GNU programs, also providing system header (e.g. unistd.h) polyfills for non-Un*x platforms (e.g. Windows). tbox Independent glib-like portable library, C99-compatible. Works best with xmake build system from the same author. sc Portable, stand-alone, single-header libraries and data structures, C99-compatible. stb Famous single-header libraries focusing on multimedia processing and game-dev utils. |
Data Structures
Common data structures.
Also please take a look at all-in-one utility libraries in the previous section, because they often include data structure implementations.
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Generic Collections | Collections-C Generic arrays, lists, hashmaps, and more. Uses void * to store any type of data. STC Similar to Collections-C, but uses macro definitions to simulate generics. klib Uses macro functions to simulate generics. |
String Manipulation
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Dynamic Strings | sds Simple Dynamic Strings library, forked from unmaintained sds. |
| Unicode Support | utf8.h Single-header UTF-8 library mimicking string.h functions. ICU International Components for Unicode, official Unicode toolkit. Includes String iteration, collation, datetime formatting, parsing, locale-sensitive text segmentation, and more. Much more heavier. |
| SIMD Acceleration | StringZilla SIMD-accelerated string fuzzy matching, edit distance, and more. |
| Regular Expressions (Regex) | hyperscan Intel’s high-performance multi-thread text matching library. Use a well-designed callback-style API and may be too complex for simple use cases. cre2 C wrapper of Google’s re2 library. Easy to use but inactively maintained. oniguruma Standalone regular expression library. Easy to use. |
(De)serialization
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| CSV | zsv Fast (simd) CSV parser. |
| JSON | Note: Here is a performance benchmark of most C/C++ JSON parser. cJSON Two-file, ultralightweight JSON parser in C89. Suitable for embedded systems, not thread safe. json-c A formal, high-performance JSON parser, with multi-threaded support. yyjson A two-file high-performance JSON parser in C89, with SIMD acceleration, claiming to be faster than C++’s simdjson. Newer and less popular than above. |
| INI | inih Single header INI file parser, good for embedded systems. |
| YAML | libyaml Official YAML parser, but inactive for a while. |
| TOML | tomlc99 C99-compliant TOML parser. |
| XML | libexpat Fast streaming XML parser, C99-compliant. libxml2 GNOME’s XML toolkit, standards-compliant and portable, C89-compliant. |
| HTML | lexbor Not just a parser, but a full-featured HTML5 Renderer. It has HTML (de)serialization support, the successor of deprecated parser myhtml by the same authors. libtidy A traditional HTML parser and pretty printer, by W3C members back in the dawn of the WWW. Stable and widely used, but inactive for a while. |
| Protocol Buffer | nanopb A protobuf implementation especially designed for embedded systems. |
Language Extensions
Try to add (or “simulate”) some modern language features to C.
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Algebraic Data Types | datatype99 Intuitive algebraic data types with exhaustive pattern matching & compile-time introspection facilities. |
| Object-Oriented Programming | GObject The type system and object class support, primarily for GTK. Requires GLib. |
| Better Macros | metalang99 Provides macros with compile-time list generation, recursion, overloading features. |
| Checked Integer Arithmetic | safe_math Integer arithmetic with overflow checking. It is a C port of C++ library SafeInt, which is recommended by Microsoft. Inactive for a while. |
| Concurrency | Note: This part needs discussion. The author (me) has no experience in C concurrency. libcsp A high-level concurrency library for C, inspired by Go. Inactive for a while. |
System
Memory Management
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Allocator | mimalloc Memory allocator with a focus on performance and small memory usage, from Microsoft. It claims to be faster than all the libraries below. jemalloc A general purpose malloc implementation that emphasizes fragmentation avoidance and scalable concurrency support, from Facebook. Widely used. tcmalloc Thread-Caching Malloc, from Google. rpmalloc Memory allocator with built-in support for thread-caching, heap-pinning and small block merging. Independent. |
| Garbage Collector | Boehm-Demers-Weiser GC A general purpose, garbage collecting storage allocator. |
Portable System Interface
Most all-in-one utilities also focus on portability. Check them first.
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| General Case | plibsys Highly portable system interface for 15+ OSes and 10+ compilers. Zero-dependency. |
| Backtrace | libunwind Introspet the call stack of a program, both local (this process) and remote (another process). Portable among Un*x systems (NOT Windows). libbacktrace Similar, but supports all of GNU/Linux, *BSD, macOS and Windows, and only supports local backtrace. Less actively maintained. |
| Environment Probing | whereami Locate the current running executable and the current running module/library on the file system. cpu_features A cross platform library to get cpu features at runtime, C99-compliant. |
| USB Access | libusb A cross-platform library to access USB devices. |
I/O & Networking
Networking is the dullest part of C programming.
Async Foundation
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Async I/O | libuv Async library for TCP/UDP/DNS/IPC/Singal Handling/File operations. Primarily developed for Node.js. |
Protocol Support
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| HTTP | libmicrohttpd A small library that makes it easy to run an HTTP server. Widely used for small projects. mongoose A two-file embedded TCP/UDP/SNTP/HTTP/MQTT/WebSocket server, designed for platforms from STM32 to Windows. Very popular, easy to learn and time-tested. libhv Full-featured async library for TCP/UDP/HTTP(S)/WebSocket client/server/proxy, and MQTT client, with a modern and easy-to-use API. |
| gRPC | Note: Unfortunately, there is no good gRPC library for C. The best way to use gRPC in C is to use the C++ bindings. |
| General RPC | thrift Apache’s Thrift RPC framework, having C binding with GLib. |
| Git | libgit2 A portable, pure C implementation of the Git core methods provided as a re-entrant linkable library. |
Database
C has incredibly complete support for databases, but it’s not as easy as using other languages. Most are low-level libraries, and you have to write a lot of codes to use them.
SQL Databases
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| ORMs | Note: Unfortunately, there is no good ORM library for C, since C is lack of generics, reflection, compile-time code generation, OOP, etc. It is recommended to use a low-level SQL library, if you really need to use C. |
| MySQL | libmysqlclient Official MySQL C API. |
| Postgres | libpq Official Postgres C API. |
| SQLite | sqlite Official SQLite library. |
| MS SQL | Microsoft® ODBC Driver for SQL Server® Official SQL driver, closed-source. |
| Oracle | ODPI-C Official Oracle C API. |
Other Databases
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Redis | Hiredis Minimalistic C client for Redis >= 1.2, officially supported. Hiredis-cluster for cluster deployments of the Redis database. |
| MongoDB | libmongoc Official MongoDB C driver. |
| Rocks DB | rocksdb Official RocksDB library for C/C++. |
| Embedded DBs | EJDB An embeddable JSON database engine. |
Math / Scientific
Some all-in-one utilities also contain math and/or scientific subroutines; check them first.
Note: Mathematics and scientific computing is a very broad field. Considering that C has been one of the go-to languages for high-performance computing since its invention, there are lots of libraries in this area. We would like to include all the common use cases for an average programmer (e.g., high-precision computation, linear algebra, transformations, etc.) instead of a math researcher (you shouldn’t rely on this list if you are doing serious mathematics, should you?), and it is not possible to discuss all of them in order to keep the list short.
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Big Integer | GMP The GNU arbitrary-precision arithmetic library. |
| Big Decimal | MPFR The GNU multiple-precision floating-point computation library with correct rounding. |
| Linear Algebra | OpenBLAS An optimized BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library. Mainly supports CPUs. CLBlast BLAS with OpenCL. Supports GPUs. clBLAS The most famous BLAS library with OpenCL, but unmaintained for a long time. cuBLAS NVIDIA’s proprietary BLAS library with CUDA. Has the maximum performance on NVIDIA GPUs. |
| Fourier Transform | FFTW A fast Discrete Fourier transform implementation. |
| DataFrame | Apache Arrow GLib Official C API for Apache Arrow. |
| Computer Vision | ccv A modern computer vision library. |
| Neural Networks | ggml Tensor library for machine learning, especially for large language models. Darknet Fast CNN library from YOLO author. Unmaintained for a long time. |
Command-Line Tool
Argument Parsing
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
POSIX/BSD-style (-cvf) |
getopt In POSIX specification, getopt is the standard method to parse command-line arguments. getopt_long GNU extension of getopt that supports long options (–foo=bar) and has been widely accepted. Included in glibc and gnulib. argparse Standalone argument parser supporting subcommands. Inactive for a while. cmd_arger A nice argument parser with declarative syntax and auto-generated help message. Inactive for a while. |
DOS-style (/C /V /F) |
getopt-dos Like getopt, but supports DOS-style options. Immature and unmaintained. |
Terminal Rendering
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Progress indicators | progressbar An easy-to-use C library for displaying text progress bars. Inactive for a while. |
| TUI | ncurses De facto standard library for TUI. Only Un*x support. pdcurses A curses implementation for DOS, OS/2, Windows console, X11 and SDL. notcurses A newer TUI/terminal graphic library if you don’t want curses. |
| Interactive prompts | readline De facto standard GNU library for interactive inputs. Bash is actually built on it, which supports history, completion, and line editing features. linenoise A small, self-contained alternative to readline and libedit. Only Un*x support, and being inactive for a while. |
Concurrency
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Parallel computation | libgomp GNU’s OpenMP implementation, a set of compiler directives and library routines for parallel computation. Easy to learn and use. Open MPI Open source MPI implementation, used for parallel computation on distributed systems. |
Cryptography
C has a solid history in cryptography, and there are many nice libraries available for cryptographic tasks. Thus popularity and maturity are the main criteria for the selection.
It is hard to classify cryptographic libraries by use cases, because most of them provide a wide range of cryptographic algorithms.
If you are looking for a specific algorithm implementation, you should check each library’s documentation to see if it supports what you want.
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| General Purpose Hashing | libgcrypt GnuPG’s cryptographic library. Provides general-purpose hash functions, symmetric and asymmetric encryption, and more. trezor-crypto Heavily optimized for embedded devices. |
| Password Hashing | libsodium An easy-to-use software library for encryption, decryption, signatures, password hashing, having a very modern and beginner-friendly API. |
| TLS/SSL | OpenSSL The de-facto standard implementation for modern cryptography. Provides a full-featured toolkit for the TLS and SSL, also with a lot of cryptographic and certificate algorithms. |
| Non-cryptographic Hashing | xxHash A fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm and implementation, claiming to be faster than memcpy. highwayhash from Google (simd), also quite fast. |
| Post-Quantum Cryptography | liboqs Experimental implementation of quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms. |
FFI / Interop
Embeds other languages into C. To embed C into other languages, just check the FFI documentation of the target language.
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Python | Python/C API The official C API for Python. |
| JavaScript | V8 Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, really fast but heavyweight. QuickJS A small and embeddable JavaScript engine with competitive performance. Duktape Even smaller and embeddable JavaScript engine (only 2 files), but less performant. |
| Lua | LuaJIT A Just-In-Time Compiler for Lua, with a C API. |
| Dart | Dart Embedding API Embed Dart into C/C++ applications. No official documentation, only community examples. |
| Wrapper Generator | SWIG Simplifies the task of interfacing different languages to C and C++ programs. |
Graphics
Note: Currently this part is mainly finished by a contributor who never works on graphics with C. If you find anything weird, please feel free to open an issue or pull request in the GitHub repository.
High-level GUI
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| Declarative UI | GTK A traditional multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. LCUI Building desktop apps with XML/CSS. Modern but immature. LVGL Light and powerful GUI library. Mainly designed for embedded systems. libui-ng Fork of unmaintained libui, a simple and portable GUI library using native widgets on Unix, Windows, and macOS. Still immature. |
| Immediate Mode UI | Nuklear Single-header immediate mode portable GUI library, C89-compatible. |
| Web-based UI | azul GUI framework for desktop applications in Rust based on Mozilla’s WebRender, having C bindings. |
| File Dialogs | tinyfiledialogs Single-file dialog library for showing cross-platform file dialogs. |
| Accessibility | AccessKit UI accessibility infrastructure across desktop platforms in Rust, having C bindings. |
Low-level Graphics
| Use Case | Recommended Tools |
|---|---|
| OpenGL | GLFW A cross-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and Vulkan, C99-compatible. glad Vulkan/GL/GLES/EGL/GLX/WGL Loader-Generator based on the official specs. Usually used with GLFW to generate GL function pointers. |
| Multi-backend Rendering | SDL A cross-platform library designed to provide low-level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL, Direct3D, etc. Stable & time-tested. raylib for games and multimedia programming. Modern & beginner-friendly. |
| Text Rendering | HarfBuzz Text shaping library, with an emphasis on internationalization. Widely used in many projects and OSes. pango Library for laying out multi-line text correctly, depending on HarfBuzz. Can be used alone but works best with a rendering backend, e.g. Cairo or Freetype. FreeType Font rasterization engine, rendering font files to bitmaps. Widely used in many projects and OSes. |