A list of open source C++ libraries

< cpp‎ | links

The objective of this page is to build a comprehensive list of open source C++ libraries, so that when one needs an implementation of particular functionality, he doesn't need to waste time searching on Google.

If you know a library that might be useful to others, please add a link to it here. There are no restrictions on what can be included except that the source of the library must be readily available to download.

The page is provided 'as is' - with the hope of being useful, but without any warranties. Outdated, misleading or wrong links might appear here. If you've noticed one of these, it would be great if you fixed the error.

Generic

• Boost -  large collection of generic libraries
• Navajo -  light and powerful http server for web application development
• BDE -  The BDE Development Environment from Bloomberg L.P.
• Dlib -  networking, threads, graphical interfaces, data structures, linear algebra, machine learning, XML and text parsing, numerical optimization, Bayesian nets, and numerous other tasks
• JUCE -  An extensive, mature, cross-platform C++ toolkit
• Loki -  design patterns
• Reason -  xml, xpath, regex, threads, sockets, http, sql, date-time, streams, encoding and decoding, filesystem, compression
• Yomm11 -  Open multi-methods for C++11
• Folly -  Facebook Open-source LibrarY. Library of C++11 components designed with practicality and efficiency in mind.
• cxxomfort - Backports of C++ features (C++11 to C++03 and C++1y proposals to C++11/C++03).
• libsourcey -  Cross-platform C++11 library for high speed networking and media encoding. HTTP, WebSockets, TURN, STUN, Symple and more...
• Neu -  C++11 framework for AI, networking and distributed objects, simulation and modeling, languages and compiler construction, concurrency, and more.
• OnPosix -  C++ library providing several abstractions (e.g., threading, networking, logging, IPC, etc.) on POSIX platforms.
• Ultimate++ -  Cross-platform rapid application development framework

Communication

• C++ RESTful framework -  C++ micro-framework designed to be embedded into a wide range of applications.
• C++ REST SDK - asynchronous HTTP client and listener, asynchronous Stream, URI, JSON
• cpp-netlib - cpp-netlib: The C++ Network Library
• Boost.Asio - asynchronous and synchronous networking, timers, serial I/O
• POCO -  networking: encryption, HTTP; Zip files
• ACE -  asynchronous networking, event demultiplexing, messaging, CORBA
• wvstreams
• gsoap
• Unicomm -  asynchronous networking, high-level TCP communication framework
• restful_mapper - ORM for consuming RESTful JSON APIs in C++
• zeromq -  fast message queue
• curlpp -  C++ wrapper for CURL library
• Apache Thrift -  The Apache Thrift software framework, for scalable cross-language services development, combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, JavaScript, Node.js, Smalltalk, OCaml and Delphi and other languages.
• libashttp -  asynchronous HTTP client library

Graphic user interface

• FLTK
• nana
• WxWidgets[src][doc]
• OWLNext - Modern update to OWL for writing GUI applications in standard C++ on Windows

GTK+

• glibmm
• gtkmm
• goocanvasmm
• libglademm
• libgnomecanvasmm
• webkitgtk
• flowcanvas
• evince

Qt

• Qt[src][doc]
• qwtplot3d
• qwt5
• libdbusmenu-qt

General Multimedia

• SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library)
• SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer)
• Cinder

Graphics

• cairomm
• nux
• pangomm
• gegl
• stb

Plotting

• plotutils

Formats

• libraw
• openexr
• qimageblitz
• imagemagick
• djvulibre
• poppler
• SVG++

Audio

• soundtouch

Fingerprinting

• chromaprint
• libofa
• libmusicbrainz

Formats

• audiofile
• flac

Tagging

• id3lib
• taglib

CD

• libkcompactdisc

Video

• crystalhd
• mjpegtools
• libmatroska
• libVLC
• gstreamermm

3D Graphics

• Ogre3D
• OpenGL
• GLEW OpenGL function loading
• GLFW OpenGL window manager
• GLM Header only C++ mathematics library for rendering
• assimp 3D model loading
• VTK
• Magnum C++11 and OpenGL/GLES/WebGL graphics engine
• Irrlicht
• Horde3D

Game Engine Architecture

• EntityX
• Anax

Internationalization

• IBM ICU
• gettext

Math

• GNU MP bignum C++ interface
• Boost.Multiprecision
• Boost.Math.Special Functions and Statistical Distributions
• Boost.Random

Linear algebra

• Boost.uBLAS
• Eigen
• Armadillo
• Blitz++
• IT++
• Dlib - linear algebra tools

Graph theory

• Boost.Graph
• LEMON
• alglib
• OGDF - Open Graph Drawing Framework

Class Library for Numbers

• cln

Machine Learning

• liblinear
• Dlib - machine learning tools
• MLPACK - machine learning package
• Shogun - large scale machine learning toolbox

Computational geometry

• CGAL - Computational geometry algorithms library
• Wykobi - Computational geometry library

Concurrency

• Intel TBB
• OpenMP
• Thrust STL-like algorithms and data-structures for CUDA
• ViennaCL Linear algebra and algorithms with OpenMP, CUDA, and OpenCL backends
• VexCL C++ expression templates library for OpenCL and CUDA
• Boost.Compute (unofficial) STL-like algorithms and data-structures for OpenCL
• Boost.Interprocess
• Boost.Thread
• Boost.Atomic
• Boost.Lockfree
• Boost.MPI
• Boost.Context
• libopenmpi
• libsimdpp
• HPX A general purpose C++ runtime system for parallel and distributed applications of any scale

Containers

• Boost.Any
• Boost.Array
• Boost.Bimap
• Boost.Container
• Boost.Fusion
• Boost.Heap
• Boost.Pointer Container
• Boost.Tuple
• Boost.Variant
• cpp-btree -  btree_map, btree_set, btree_multimap, btree_multiset.

Serialization

• Boost.Serialization
• libs11n
• sweet_persist
• protobuf
• C++ XML objects
• yaml-cpp
• YAS (Yet Another Serialization)
• cereal (C++11 serialization)

Testing

• Boost.Test
• cppunit
• Google Test
• Catch
• jest - A sane and minimal C++14 unit test framework

Benchmarking

• Celero

XML

• libxml++
• pugixml
• tinyxml
• Xerces

JSON

• jsonme--
• ThorsSerializer
• JsonBox
• jsoncpp
• zoolib
• JOST
• CAJUN
• libjson
• nosjob
• rapidjson
• jsoncons -  jsoncons is a C++ library for the construction of tree structured json values. It also supports an event-based streaming API.
• JSON++
• qjson
• json-cpp
• jansson -  Jansson is C library for encoding, decoding and manipulating JSON data.
• json11 -  json11 is a tiny JSON library for C++11, providing JSON parsing and serialization.
• JSON Voorhees - Killer JSON for C++
• jeayeson - A very sane (header only) C++14 JSON library

Web

• libmusicbrainz5
• liblastfm
• libkcddb
• Chromium Embedded
• Wt[src][doc]

GPS

• gpsd

Databases

• QxOrm - C++ Qt Object-Relational Mapping (ORM)
• mysql++
• libpqxx
• brig
• SOCI
• DTL
• sqlpp11
• ODB - C++ Object-Relational Mapping (ORM)
• QUINCE: QUeries IN C++ Expressions (ORM+EDSL)

Cryptography

• Botan
• gnutls
• openssl
• crypto++

File metadata

• libkexiv2
• exiv2
• exempi
• rarian

Text

Parse

• PEGTL -  Parsing Expression Grammar Template Library

Search

• clucene
• xapian

Terminal

• cwidget

Configuration

• gconfmm
• libconfig
• Boost.Program_options

Embedded languages bindings

• ChaiScript
• ExprTk
• lua
• mozjs
• muparser
• PythonQt

Embedded/realtime

• QP/C++ -  RTOS kernel, dual GPL
• FreeRTOS C++ Handler -  handler, looper, state machine, CLI, portable

PDF

• HARU
• PoDoFo
• JagPDF