c

obsproject/obs-studio

OBS Studio Remains the Core Tool for Free Streaming and Recording — OBS Studio is the open-source engine behind most free live streaming and screen recording setups, handling capture, compositing, and encoding for platforms like Twitch and YouTube. Backed by an active community, plugin ecosystem, and translation project, it stays the default choice for streamers and recorders who need a capable, no-cost tool.

mpv-player/mpv

mpv: the scriptable, GPU-shader-driven command line media player — mpv is a free, cross-platform command line media player supporting a wide range of formats, codecs, and subtitles. It renders video via GPU shaders rather than fixed-function hardware, and is extensible through user scripts, making it popular with power users who want fine-grained playback control.

lz4/lz4

LZ4: the longstanding speed-first compressor, still benchmarked against memcpy — LZ4 is a mature lossless compression library prized for extreme decompression speed (multi-GB/s per core) and tunable compression via an acceleration factor, with an LZ4_HC mode for better ratios at the same decode speed. It supports dictionary compression for small files and ships both a BSD-licensed library and a GPL CLI tool, useful wherever throughput matters more than ratio.

cs341-illinois/coursebook

An open textbook that rebuilds Illinois' systems programming wikibook — This free textbook backs UIUC's CS 341 course, rewriting Angrave's original wikibook with added citations, footnotes, and a glossary for rigor. It auto-builds into PDF, markdown, and HTML, making it useful for students or instructors teaching C, Linux, and POSIX systems programming.

da-luce/astroterm

A Night Sky Planetarium Rendered Entirely in ASCII — astroterm is a C-based terminal app that renders real-time positions of stars, planets, moon phases, and constellation figures as ASCII art. You can set date, time, and location to explore past, present, or future skies, making it a fun tool for terminal enthusiasts and stargazers without a telescope.

rogerbinns/apsw

A deeper SQLite binding than the stdlib sqlite3 module — APSW exposes the complete SQLite C API from Python, including full text search, sessions, virtual tables, VFS, JSON and CArray, with async framework support. Unlike the builtin sqlite3 module, which mimics other DB drivers, APSW targets developers who want full SQLite functionality and stays current with both SQLite and CPython (3.11+).

yappologistic/CUI

Native UI components for C: about 150 of them, with spring motion and full keyboard support. Windows, macOS and Linux, no dependencies.

prabanta-dev/janas

Running 80B-parameter models beyond RAM, outpacing llama.cpp — Janas is a pure C inference engine that runs LLMs larger than available memory using NVMe, speculative decoding and SIMD/Vulkan acceleration. Benchmarks on a 32 GB laptop show it beating llama.cpp on all 13 tested models, most dramatically on 48 GB MoE models like Qwen3-Next-80B. Aimed at people wanting fast local LLM inference on consumer CPU/GPU hardware without extra RAM.

stencil-hq/dquickts

QuickJS with durable execution: suspend running JS, snapshot the whole heap, resume it in another process. Native TypeScript, a REPL that survives restarts, Rust bindings.

clainstone/cbirds

Boids flocking simulation rendered right in your terminal — A single dependency-free C99 program that simulates Craig Reynolds' boids flocking algorithm, drawing birds as braille characters in any terminal or as sprites via the Kitty graphics protocol in Kitty and Ghostty. Great for ricing setups, screensavers, or anyone curious about creative coding in the terminal on Linux and macOS.

rkaehn/uniform

A full UI stack for C and JavaScript, under 280 KB — Uniform is a cross-platform UI toolkit with no visual identity of its own, designed so designers can implement pixel-perfect layouts, animations, and custom visuals with consistent behavior across platforms. It offers both a no-build JavaScript API (compiling to WASM) and a C API, rendering via Metal on Apple platforms and WebGPU on the web, with Vulkan support planned. It's in early Preview, aimed at developers who want low-level rendering control without native toolkit overhead.