Let us look at some of the most awesome C++ libraries, frameworks, engines and resources across a multitude of categories. Most of them are open source.
Standard Libraries
A collection of classes and functions, which are written in the core language and part of the C++ ISO Standard itself.
The Standard Template Library (STL
A specification of a C standard library for POSIX systems.
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21The C++ Standards Committee. [website](http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/
The purpose of this manual is to tell you how to use the facilities of the GNU C Library.
Frameworks
Abseil C++ Common Libraries.
STDCXX, A collection of algorithms, containers, iterators, and other fundamental components. [retired]
Apache Portable Runtime. Another library of cross-platform utility functions.
Adobe Source Libraries provides peer-reviewed and portable C++ source libraries.
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A large collection of generic C++ libraries. [website](http://www.boost.org/
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The BDE Development Environment from Bloomberg Labs.
C++ Parallel Computing and Asynchronous Networking Engine.
A community-developed, free and open source library for professional-quality creative coding.
A collection of C++ libraries, containing a go-style coroutine library, log, JSON, RPC framework and other base components.
A small, header-only library that backports various facilities from more recent C++ Standards to C++03 and later.
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A toolkit for making real world machine learning and data analysis applications in C++ [website](http://dlib.net/
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Electronic Arts Standard Template Library.
Embedded Template Library.
Framework for Enterprise Application Development.
An open-source C++ library developed and used at Facebook.
Functional Programming Library for C++. Write concise and readable C++ code.
GLib provides the core application building blocks for libraries and applications written in C.
An all-encompassing C++ class library for developing cross-platform software. [Core-Module: ISC, Rest: GPL2/GPL3/Commercial] [website](http://www.juce.com/
A free and open source C++ modular multi-purpose cross platform RAD framework. [website](https://kigs-framework.org/
libPhenom is an eventing framework for building high performance and high scalability systems in C.
C++11 evented IO for real-time video streaming and high performance networking applications.
A multiplatform utility library written in C.
A C++ library of designs, containing flexible implementations of common design patterns and idioms.
Minimal headers-only C++ Library.
A cross platform open source toolkit for creative coding in C++. [website](http://www.openframeworks.cc/
A cross platform framework designed to bring the ease of use of Java, .Net, or Python to developers who require the performance and strength of C++.
A set of OO frameworks with all the functionality needed to handle and analyze large amounts of data in a very efficient way. Used at CERN.
An advanced, open-source C++ framework for high-performance server applications on modern hardware. [Apache-2.0 License] [seastar.io](http://seastar.io/
An exemplary version of STL. [Free]
Standard Template Library for Extra Large Data Sets.
A glib-like multi-platform c library. [website](http://tboox.org/
A C++ cross-platform rapid application development framework.
The small STL library.
A C++ library for developing Windows applications and UI components. [Public]
Fast, Orthogonal, Open multi-methods. Supersedes [Yomm11](https://github.com/jll63/yomm11
Artificial Intelligence
A GPU (CUDA
Game Behavior Tree Starter Kit.
A template-based, ANSI-C++ evolutionary computation library which helps you to write your own stochastic optimization algorithms insanely fast.
Header-only library for using Keras models in C++.
Simple neural network library in C.
Lightweight, Portable, Flexible Distributed/Mobile Deep Learning with Dynamic, Mutation-aware Dataflow Dep Scheduler; for Python, R, Julia, Scala, Go, Javascript and more [website](https://mxnet.apache.org
Tensors and Dynamic neural networks in Python with strong GPU acceleration. [website](https://pytorch.org
Flashlight is a fast, flexible machine learning library written entirely in C++.
(3D
An open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs
An open-source cross-platform performance library for deep learning applications. [website](https://01.org/onednn
Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK
A header only, dependency-free deep learning framework in C++11.
Distributed platform for rapid Deep learning application development.
Toolkit for speech recognition.
Asynchronous Event Loop
A cross-platform C++ library for network and low-level I/O programming that provides developers with a consistent asynchronous model using a modern C++ approach. [website](http://think-async.com/
A cross-platform C++ library for network and low-level I/O programming.
An Open Source Implementation of the Actor Model in C++. [website](http://actor-framework.org/
An event queue which focuses on thread safety and provides dependency injection.
A full-featured and high-performance event loop that is loosely modelled after libevent, but without its limitations and bugs. [BSD and GPL]
An event notification library.
Cross-platform event loop library.
Cross-platform asynchronous I/O.
Header only library that implements Promise/A+ standard. [Anti-996]
C++ wrapper for libuv.
Audio
Audio, Sound, Music, Digitized Voice Libraries
A simple C++ library for reading and writing audio files. [GPL3]
Single file audio decoding libraries for C and C++.
An easy to use crossplatform audio engine and audio content creation tool for games. [Free for non-commercial/Commercial]
Fast, modern C++ DSP framework, FFT, FIR/IIR filters, Sample Rate Conversion. [GPL/Commercial]
LAME is a high quality MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3
C library with C++ wrapper for reading and writing files containing sampled sound through one standard library interface. [LGPL-2.1] [website](http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/
C library for cross-platform real-time audio input and output. [website](http://libsound.io/
C++ Audio and Music DSP Library.
Open Audio LibraryA crossplatform audio API. [BSD/LGPL/Commercial]
Single file audio playback and capture library. [website](https://miniaud.io/
C++ library for reading and writing audio files.
A totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec.
PortAudio is a free, cross-platform, open-source, audio I/O library.
SimplE Lossless Audio.
Easy, portable audio engine for games.
A free codec for free speech. Obsoleted by Opus.
Easy and efficient audio synthesis in C++.
Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format.
Public domain, header-only MP3 decoder with clean-room implementation. [CC0]
Verovio is a fast and lightweight music notation engraving library. [website](https://www.verovio.org
Public domain, a fast open source speech processing toolkit written entirely in C++ and uses the ArrayFire tensor library and the flashlight machine learning library for maximum efficiency
Biology
Bioinformatics, Genomics, Biotech
C++ Computational Libraries for Bioinformatics.
An open source C++ library for the computational simulation of mathematical models developed for physiology and biology.
A C++ library for representing and analyzing population genetics data.
Algorithms and data structures for the analysis of sequences with the focus on biological data. [BSD/3-clause]
A C++ library for parsing and manipulating VCF files.
Structural variants (SVs
BitTorrent
BitTorrent DHT library in C.
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(a.k.a. libtorrent-rasterbar
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(a.k.a. libtorrent-rakshasa
uTorrent Transport Protocol library.
Chemistry
Chemistry, Quantum Chemistry, Solid-State Chemistry/Physics, Geochemistry, Biochemistry
A molecular dynamics trajectory analysis engine in C++ and Lua with Nix. It is an acronym for Deferred Structural Elucidation Analysis for Molecular Simulations. [website](https://dseams.info
A message-passing parallel molecular dynamics implementation. [website](http://www.gromacs.org
A computational framework in C++ and Python for modeling chemically reactive systems. [website](https://reaktoro.org
A classical molecular dynamics code with a focus on materials modeling. It's an acronym for Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator. [website](https://lammps.sandia.gov/
Multiresolution Adaptive Numerical Environment for Scientific Simulation. [website](https://github.com/m-a-d-n-e-s-s/madness
The Massively Parallel Quantum Chemistry program, MPQC, computes properties of atoms and molecules from first principles using the time independent Schrödinger equation. [website](https://mpqc.org/
An ab initio computational chemistry package. [website](https://psicode.org/
CLI
Console/Terminal User Interface, Command Line Interface
A minimalist, frustration-free, header-only argument handler.
A simple header-only C++ argument parser library.
A library to obtain program options via conventional methods such as command line and config file.
A simple to use, composable, command line parser for C++ 11 and beyond.
A cross-platform header only C++14 library for interactive command line interfaces (Cisco style
Header only single or multi-file C++11 library for simple and advanced CLI parsing.
Lightweight C++ command line option parser.
A library to generate option parser from docstring.
Library for creating terminal applications with text-based widgets.
Commandline flags module for C++.
Activity indicators for Modern C++.
A small self-contained alternative to readline and libedit.
A small, portable GNU readline replacement for Linux, Windows and MacOS which is capable of handling UTF-8 characters.
A simple to use, composable, command line parser for C++ 11 and beyond.
A terminal user interface.
Convenient, high-performance RGB color and position control for console output.
Public domain curses library with both source code and pre-compiled library available.
A single-header templated command line arguments and ini file parser for C++ 11 and beyond.
A readline and libedit replacement that supports UTF-8, syntax highlighting, hints, works on Unix and Windows.
Table Maker for Modern C++
A mature, stable and feature-rich library for defining and accessing command line arguments in ANSI C++.
A C library for writing text-based user interfaces.
Small header only C++ library for writing multiplatform terminal applications.
C++ Functional Terminal User Interface.
Immediate Mode Text-based User Interface
Compression
Compression and Archiving Libraries
A C++ static library offering a clean and simple interface to the 7-zip DLLs. [GPLv2]
Brotli compression format. Developed by Google.
A freely available, patent free, high-quality data compressor.
New generation entropy codecs : Finite State Entropy and Huff0.
A library to provide abstract access to various archives. It is intended for use in video games, and the design was somewhat inspired by Quake 3's file subsystem.
A library for creating, reading, writing and manipulating file archives like zip and tar. It also provides transparent compression and decompression of data, using formats like gzip, via a subclass of QIODevice.
Multi-format archive and compression library. [New BSD] [website](http://www.libarchive.org/
Extremely Fast Compression algorithm. [website](http://www.lz4.org/
LZFSE compression library and command line tool. Developed by Apple.
Lossless data compression library with a compression ratio similar to LZMA but with much faster decompression.
An extremely fast real-time lossless data compression library.
Single C source file Deflate/Inflate compression library with zlib-compatible API, ZIP archive reading/writing, PNG writing.
Zlib with latest bug fixes that supports PKWARE disk spanning, AES encryption, and IO buffering.
Small strings compression library.
A fast compressor/decompressor.
A very compact compression library for data streams.
zlib for the "next generation" systems. Drop-In replacement with some serious optimizations.
ZstandardFast real-time compression algorithm. Developed by Facebook.
Provides read access on ZIP-archives. [MPL/LGPL]
Concurrency
Concurrency and Multithreading
Abstraction library for parallel kernel acceleration. [LGPLv3+]
A general purpose GPU library.
A lightweight concurrency framework for C++11, inspired by the Microsoft PPL library and the N3428 C++ standard proposal.
A C++ GPU Computing Library for OpenCL.
A C++ template library optimized for GPUs.
Concurrency primitives, safe memory reclamation mechanisms and non-blocking data structures.
A fast multi-producer, multi-consumer lock-free concurrent queue for C++11. [BSD,Boost]
Fast C++ Parallel Programming with Task Dependencies.
CUB provides state-of-the-art, reusable software components for every layer of the CUDA programming mode. [New BSD]
Lightweight, Modern-C++ wrappers for the CUDA GPU programming runtime API.
C++ API to run CUDA/C++ on OpenMP, Threads, TBB, ... through Alpaka. [LGPLv3+]
A reactive programming library for C++11.
Task-based multi-threading library that supports task graphs with arbitrary dependencies.
A general purpose C++ runtime system for parallel and distributed applications of any scale.
A task scheduling framework designed for the needs of game developers.
Intel® implementation of C++17 STL for C++11 and above.
Intel® Threading Building Blocks.
A library of concurrent data structures in C++.
A performance portable programming model for parallel execution and memory abstraction.
A C++ library of Concurrent Data Structures.
An OpenCL based GPU accelerated SPH fluid simulation library.
Introduces structured concurrency in C.
Grand Central Dispatch (GCD
Introduces Go-style concurrency in C.
Marl is a hybrid thread / fiber task scheduler written in C++ 11.
moderngpu is a productivity library for general-purpose computing on GPUs. It is a header-only C++ library written for CUDA. The unique value of the library is in its accelerated primitives for solving irregularly parallel problems.
Optimized primitives for collective multi-GPU communication.
The open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems.
The OpenMP API.
Event loop friendly C++ actor micro framework.
An implementation of Actor, Publish-Subscribe, and CSP models in one rather small C++ framework.
A powerful C++ coroutine dispatcher framework built on top of [boost::coroutines2](https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_65_0/libs/coroutine2/doc/html/index.html
The RaftLib C++ library, streaming/dataflow concurrency via C++ iostream-like operators
A fast single-producer, single-consumer lock-free queue for C++.
Efficient STL-like Data Structures on the GPU.
A parallel algorithms library which resembles the C++ Standard Template Library (STL
A header-only C++ library for task concurrency.
A C++ vector expression template library for OpenCL/CUDA.
A C++ parallel programming framework designed to work on both shared and distributed memory parallel computers.
A general concurrency library containing tasks, executors, timers and C++20 coroutines to rule them all.
Configuration
Configuration files, INI files
A header-only and easy to use Ini file parser for C++.
Simple .INI file parser in C, good for embedded systems.
Single header only C++ version of [inih](https://github.com/benhoyt/inih
INI file parser.
C, C++ library for processing structured configuration files. [LGPL-2.1] [website](https://hyperrealm.github.io/libconfig/
Small configuration file parser library for C.
Cross-platform C++ library providing a simple API to read and write INI-style configuration files.
Header-only TOML parser and serializer for C++17 and later. [website](https://marzer.github.io/tomlplusplus/
Containers
A template library that implements ordered in-memory containers based on a B-tree data structure.
An unordered "bag"-type container which outperforms std containers in high-modification scenarios while maintaining permanent pointers to non-erased elements regardless of insertion/erasure. [website](http://www.plflib.org/colony.htm
A C++17 header-only dynamic bitset.
Template library implementing an AVL, a Binary Search, a KD and a Quad Tree.
Implementation of open addressing hash table algorithms in C++.
A fast header-only hash map which uses hopscotch hashing for collisions resolution.
A c++ toolbox of locality-sensitive hashing (LSH
A data structure that enables fast lookup, predecessor, range searches and updates in arrays of billions of items using orders of magnitude less space than traditional indexes.
A std::list implementation which removes range splicing in order to enable cache-friendlier structure, yielding significant performance gains.
A replacement container for the std::stack container adaptor, with better performance than any std container in a stack context.
A simplified implementation of Arthur O'Dwyer's ring_span implementation ie. a circular buffer view.
Fast & memory efficient hashtable based on robin hood hashing for C++14.
Fast hash map and hash set using robin hood hashing.
A fast, memory efficient hash map for C++.
Cryptography
Cryptography and Encryption Libraries
A cross platform file encryption utility. Encrypted files are portable across all supported operating systems and processors.
A portable and fast cryptography library. [LGPLv2.1+]
A crypto library for C++. [BSD-2]
A free C++ class library of cryptographic schemes. [website](http://www.cryptopp.com/
C++11 header-only message digest (hash
A complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard.
A secure communications library implementing the SSL, TLS and DTLS protocols. [LGPL2.1]
A general purpose cryptographic library originally based on code from GnuPG. [LGPLv2.1+]
A free version of the SSL/TLS protocol forked from OpenSSL in 2014.
P(ortable|ackageable
A lightweight, secure, easy-to-use crypto library suitable for constrained environments.
A fairly comprehensive, modular and portable cryptographic toolkit.
An open source, portable, easy to use, readable and flexible SSL library, previously known as PolarSSL. [website](https://tls.mbed.org/
A low-level cryptographic library.
A robust, commercial-grade, full-featured, and Open Source cryptography library. [website](http://www.openssl.org/
A collection of hash functions, ciphers, tools, libraries, and materials related to cryptography.
An implementation of the TLS/SSL protocols.
Library and command line tool to detect SHA-1 collision in a file.
A multi-language, cross-platform library that provides cryptographic APIs that are secure, easy to use correctly, and hard(er
Small portable AES128/192/256 in C.
crypto library for painless data security, providing symmetric and asymmetric encryption, secure sockets with forward secrecy, for mobile and server platforms.
CSV
Libraries for parsing Comma Separated Value (CSV) files
Fast CSV parser for modern C++.
Compile-time and runtime CSV parser written in C++17.
Small, easy-to-use and fast header-only library for reading CSV files.
A fast, self-contained, streaming C++17 CSV parser with optional type-casting and statistics.
Database
Database Libraries, SQL Servers, ODBC Drivers, and Tools
C++ client for ClickHouse DBMS.
C++ Object-relational mapping for sqlite3.
A minimalistic C client library for the Redis database.
A fast key-value storage library written at Google that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values.
Very fast embedded key/value store with full ACID semantics. [OpenLDAP]
C++11 wrapper for the LMDB embedded database library.
MongoDB client library for C.
C++ driver for MongoDB.
A BSON utility library.
A C++ wrapper for MySQL's C API.
A small C++ wrapper for the native C ODBC API.
An open-source, cross-platform, and cross-database object-relational mapping (ORM
Wrapper of hiredis with clean C++ interface, supporting sentinel and ready to use patterns.
Embedded key-value store for fast storage from facebook.
High performance, shared memory, lock free, cross platform, single file, minimal dependencies, C++11 key-value store
A database abstraction layer for C++.
A completely embedded, full-featured relational database in a few 100k that you can include right into your project.
SQLiteC++ (SQLiteCpp
Header only C++14 wrapper around sqlite library.
SQLite ORM light header only library for modern C++. [AGPL + paid MIT]
A type safe embedded domain specific language for SQL queries and results in C++.
Fast Dense and Sparse Multidimensional Array DBMS. [website](https://tiledb.io/
A self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional NoSQL engine. [website](https://unqlite.org/
An embedded "typed" key/value store with a built-in query interface.
Data visualization
Data visiualization Libraries
C++ Graphics Library for Data Visualization. [website](https://alandefreitas.github.io/matplotplusplus/
Debug
Debugging Libraries, Memory Leak and Resource Leak Detection, Unit Testing
A beautiful stack trace pretty printer for C++.
Google provided small microbenchmark support library.
Boost Test Library.
Check is a unit testing framework for C. [LGPL-2.1] [website](https://libcheck.github.io/check/
The lightest feature rich C++ single header testing framework.
A modern, C++-native, header-only, test framework for unit-tests, TDD and BDD.
C++ Benchmarking Framework.
Unit testing and mocking framework for C/C++.
C++ Unit Testing Easier. [LGPL3]
unit testing framework for C with support for mock objects.
C++ port of JUnit.
The CMake test driver program.
A dbg(…
Debug logging viewer. [BSL]
A tool for resource leak detection, including memory, GDI and handle leaks.
A micro-framework for creating fake C functions.
A library for writing and using C++ mock classes.
Google C++ Testing Framework.
Multiplatform debug heap useful for tracking down memory errors.
Write tests in C.
Tracking memory allocations in C++.
Profiler with web-view for multiple platforms.
A minimal unit testing framework for C self-contained in a single header file.
Eclipse CDT plug-in for C++ Seams and Mock Objects.
A simple low-overhead cross-platform timer class for benchmarking. [website](http://www.plflib.org/nanotimer.htm
A C++ micro-benchmarking framework. [CC]
Single C File Profiler with Web Viewer.
Automated regression testing system for testing complex mission-critical workflows. [website](https://touca.io/
A lightweight unit testing framework for C++. [MIT/X Consortium license]
Simple Unit Testing for C.
Single header unit testing framework for C and C++.
C++20 single header/single module, macro-free μ(micro
Visual Leak Detector. A free, robust, open-source memory leak detection system for Visual C++.
Font
Libraries for parsing and manipulating font files.
Font configuration and customization library. [website](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/fontconfig/
FreeType is a freely available software library to render fonts. [FTL & GPLv2]
A C library and utility used for parsing and writing OpenType font files.
Game Engine
A high speed C++17 Vulkan game engine.
A cross-platform library mainly aimed for video games and multimedia programming.
A multi-platform framework for building 2d games, interactive books, demos and other graphical applications.
A game engine written in pure C, SDL and OpenGL.
Crown is a general purpose data-driven game engine, written from scratch in orthodox C++ with a minimalistic and data-oriented design philosophy in mind.
A robust simulation platform.
Gaming meets modern C++.
A cross-platform native C++ game framework for creating 2D/3D mobile and desktop games.
A fully featured, open source, MIT licensed, game engine.
Community project to build a free game engine for implementing open world 3D games.
A lightweight game engine written in C++14 with a "true" entity-component system. [Apache 2.0]
a cross-platform open source game engine with plugin-based architecture. [GPLv2] [website](http://www.klayge.org/
A cross-platform 2D game engine with an emphasis on performance, written in C++11 and optionally scriptable in Lua. [website](https://ncine.github.io/
An open-source, real-time, multi-platform 3D engine based on Amazon Lumberyard. [website](https://o3de.org/
a community-modified X-Ray engine used in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series. [Modified BSD/non-commercial only]
A cross-platform 2D C++ game engine.
A game engine, a framework for 3D rendering and game development for Python and C++ programs. [website](https://www.panda3d.org/
The official distribution of olcPixelGameEngine, a tool used in javidx9's YouTube videos and projects. [OLC3]
A cross-platform framework for creative code in C++ (with Lua bindings
A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming. \ [website](http://www.raylib.com/
A powerful free cross-platform RTS game engine. [GPLv2/GPLv3] [website](https://springrts.com/
An open-source and cross-platform C++ engine built for 2D game development. [website](https://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-2d
An open-source C++ engine built for 3D game development. [website](https://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d
toy is a thin and modular c++ game engine and offers simple expressive c++ idioms to design full featured 2D or 3D games in fast iterations.
A free lightweight, cross-platform 2D and 3D game engine implemented in C++. Greatly inspired by OGRE and Horde3D.
GUI
Graphic User Interface
Native, mobile, cross-platform GUI Framework. [GPL/LGPL/Commercial] [website](https://www.boden.io
Flexible, cross-platform GUI library.
Lightweight, fine-grained, resolution independent, modular GUI library.
Fast, light, cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit.
GPU Accelerated C++ User Interface, with WYSIWYG developing tools, XML supports, built-in data binding and MVVM features. [Ms-PL]
A multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.
The official C++ interface for the popular GUI library GTK+.
Immediate Mode Graphical User Interface with minimal dependencies.
Immediate Mode Plotting widgets for imgui.
Multi-platform toolkit for building graphical user interfaces.
Simple and portable (but not inflexible
Fast, flexible and simple GUI.
Nana is a cross-platform library for GUI programming in modern C++ style.
A minimalistic cross-platform widget library for OpenGL 3.x or higher.
A single-header ANSI C gui library.
Qt plotting widget without further dependencies.
Qt Widgets for Technical Applications. [Own based on LGPL]
A feature-rich Qt/OpenGL-based C++ programming library, providing essentially a bunch of 3D-widgets.
The HTML/CSS User Interface library evolved. Fork of libRocket.
Sciter is an embeddable HTML/CSS/scripting engine aimed to be used as an UI layer of modern desktop applications. [Free/Commercial]
A C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other platforms with a single code base. [Own LGPL]
Modern C++17/20 framework to create console (CLI
A library for creating native cross-platform GUI apps. [LGPLv2]
Graphics
Open Asset Import Library (assimp
A cross-platform rendering library.
2D vector graphics engine powered by a JIT compiler. [website](https://blend2d.com/
Modern C++14 library for the development of real-time graphical applications.
A 2D graphics library with support for multiple output devices.
A C++11 header-only turtle graphics library acting as a CImg wrapper.
A modern cross-platform low-level 3D graphics library.
A collection of helper classes for writing DirectX 11.x code in C++.
A simple, cross-platform OpenGL wrangling library. \
A basic 3D scene implemented with various engines, frameworks or APIs.
A small 3D rendering and animation engine. [EPL]
A small and efficient set of libraries for building cross-platform client or server applications that use 3D graphics.
A high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++.
Simple C++ geometry processing library.
Low Level Graphics Library (LLGL
Lightweight and modular C++11/C++14 graphics middleware for games and data visualization.
Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations.
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A scene-oriented, real-time, flexible 3D rendering engine (as opposed to a game engine
An open source high performance 3D graphics toolkit.
Pixar's library for evaluating and rendering subdivision surfaces on CPU and GPU.
Library and tools for storing, editing, and rendering volumetric datasets.
A framework for 3D rendering and game development for Python and C++.
Library for wrangling particle data, with support for most common file formats.
A complete 2D graphic library for drawing Text, Geometries, and Images. [website](https://skia.org/
A small, yet powerful ANSI C library for interpolating, transforming, and querying arbitrary NURBS, B-Splines, and Bézier curves.
Cross-platform rendering and game engine.
Tiny C++ Libraries for Data-Driven Physically-based Graphics.
Image Processing
Generic Image Library.
A small, open source, C++ toolkit for image processing. [Own LGPL or GPL]
An image processing and conversion library to load, save, display, transform BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, MNG, ICO, PCX, TGA, WMF, WBMP, JBG, J2K images.
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A modern C++11 machine learning, computer vision, numerical optimization, and deep learning toolkit. [website](http://dlib.net/
An open source library that supports popular graphics image formats and others as needed by today's multimedia applications. [GPL2 or GPL3]
GD Graphics Library, famously used in PHP for image loading/manipulation & thumbnail generation. [custom permissive license, requires mention in user docs] [website](http://libgd.github.io/
DICOM Toolkit.
Grassroots DICOM library.
An open-source, cross-platform system for image analysis. [Apache2 from ITK 4.0]
Leptonica is an open source library containing software that is broadly useful for image processing and image analysis applications. [website](http://leptonica.org/index.html
Open source library for face detection in images. The face detection speed can reach 1500FPS.
A JPEG image codec that uses SIMD instructions to accelerate baseline JPEG encoding and decoding. [IJG & BSD-3-Clause & zlib] [website](https://libjpeg-turbo.org/
A fast image processing library with low memory needs. [website](http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
ImageMagick program interfaces for C++.
ImageMagick program interfaces for C.
Cross-platform library for high dynamic range imaging.
Powerful image and texture wrangling library with support for a wide number of common lossy and RAW formats.
Easy-to-use cross-platform image decoding library with pluggable image codecs.
C++ image processing library with using of SIMD: SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AVX2, AVX-512, VMX(Altivec
STB single-header image loading library.
An OCR engine.
Tiny ISO-compliant C++ EXIF and XMP parsing library for JPEG.
A C++14 high performance video and image processing library.
A generic C++ computer vision library for image analysis. [MIT X11]
Open-source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing and visualization.
Internationalization
GNU 'gettext'.
A set of C/C++ and Java libraries providing Unicode and Globalization support. [ICU]
An encoding conversion library between different character encodings.
Single header utf8 string functions for C and C++.
A clean C library for processing UTF-8 Unicode data.
Inter-process communication
Efficient cross-language IPC/RPC, works between C++, Java, Python, PHP, C#, and many more other languages. Originally developed by Facebook.
Fast data interchange format and capability-based RPC system. [website](https://capnproto.org/
Pub/sub, client/server, C++/Python/C#, various message protocols (protobuf, capnproto ..
A high performance, open source, general-purpose RPC framework. [website](http://www.grpc.io/
Comprehensive RPC framework with support for C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python and more. [GPLv2]
JSON-RPC framework for C++ servers and clients.
A simple high-performance implementation of several "scalability protocols". [website](http://nanomsg.org/
nanomsg-next-generation, a light-weight brokerless messaging library. [website](https://nanomsg.github.io/nng/
A modern C++ msgpack-RPC server and client library.
A simple RPC wrapper generator to C/C++ functions.
Provides RPC and pub/sub messaging patterns. (various implementations, various languages
A lightweight RPC library based on XML and HTTP.
JSON
A property tree parser/generator that can be used to parse XML/JSON/INI/Info files.
Ultralightweight JSON parser in ANSI C.
JSON parser and generator for C/C++. [GPL & GPL2]
C library for encoding, decoding and manipulating JSON data.
jbson is a library for building & iterating BSON data, and JSON documents in C++14.
A very sane (header only
A minimalistic JSON parser in C.
A JSON parser in C++.
A simple one header/one source solution to parsing JSON in C and C++.
A JSON implementation in C.
A C++ header-only library for JSON and JSON-like binary formats with JSONPointer, JSONPatch, JSONPath and JMESPath.
A C++ library for interacting with JSON.
Very low footprint JSON parser written in portable ANSI C.
A tiny JSON library for C++11.
High performance, single header JSON parser parsing to and from C++ structs.
JSON library for C++. Support for C++11. No dependencies, fast and dev-friendly.
Very simple C++ JSON Parser.
A JSON parser and printer library in C. easy to integrate with any model.
Lightweight JSON library.
Parson is a lighweight json library written in C.
A header-file-only, JSON parser serializer in C++.
A simple class for parsing JSON data into a QVariant hierarchy and vice versa.
A qt-based library that maps JSON data to QVariant objects.
Lightweight, extremely high-performance JSON parser for C++11.
Extremely fast JSON library that can parse gigabytes of JSON per second.
Zero-dependency C++ header-only JSON library.
µjson is a a small, C++11, UTF-8, JSON library.
A fast streaming JSON parsing library in C.
A high performance JSON library written in ANSI C.
Logging
Attribute-based logging framework, which is designed to be fast, modular and highly customizable.
Designed to be very modular and extensible.
Extremely light-weight high performance logging library for C++11 (or higher
A performant fmtlib-style logging library with latency in nanoseconds.
Asynchronous logger with Dynamic Sinks.
C++ implementation of the Google logging module.
A library of C++ classes for flexible logging to files, syslog, IDSA and other destinations.
A simple to use C++ logging API providing thread-safe, flexible, and arbitrarily granular control over log management and configuration. [BSD & Apache2]
A lightweight C++ logging library.
Portable and simple log for C++ in less than 1000 lines of code.
Low-latency, high-throughput, asynchronous logging library for C++.
Super fast, header only, C++ logging library.
A very small and lightweight C++ library which you can use to add logging to your C++ applications.
An open source and cross-platform library for high-speed sending telemetry & trace data with minimal usage of CPU and memory.
Asynchronous cross platform low latency logging library.
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