A list of open-source C++ libraries
From cppreference.com
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, one needn’t to waste time searching on web (DuckDuckGo, Google, Bing, etc.)
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 Outdated, misleading or wrong links might appear here.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.
[edit] Package managers
| Package manager | Description |
|---|---|
| build2 | An open-source (MIT), cross-platform build toolchain that aims to approximate Rust Cargo’s convenience for developing and packaging C/C++ projects while providing more depth and flexibility, especially in the build system. |
| cget | Cmake package retrieval. This can be used to download and install cmake packages. |
| cmodule | Non-intrusive cmake dependency management. |
| conan | Decentralized, open-source (MIT), C/C++ package manager. |
| CPM.cmake | A cmake script that adds dependency management capabilities to cmake. It’s built as a thin wrapper around cmake’s FetchContent module that adds version control, caching, a simple API and more. |
| hunter | A cmake driven cross-platform package manager for C/C++ projects. |
| spack | A package manager for supercomputers, Linux, and macOS. It makes installing scientific software easy. It isn’t tied to a particular language. |
| teaport | A cocoapods inspired dependency manager. |
| vcpkg | A C/C++ package manager for Windows, Linux, and macOS. |
| xmake | A cross-platform Lua-based C/C++ build tool and package manager. |
[edit] Libraries
[edit] Audio
| Library | Description | License | Configuration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amplitude Audio SDK | A cross-platform audio engine designed with the needs of games in mind. (Src) | Apache-2.0 | cmake, vcpkg |
| Aquila | An open-source and cross-platform DSP library for C++11. | MIT | cmake |
| Aubio | A C/Python library for audio and music analysis. (Src) | GPL-3.0 | make |
| audioFlux | A C library for audio and music analysis, feature extraction. | MIT | |
| Essentia | An open-source library and tools for audio and music analysis, description and synthesis (MIR) (Src) | Affero GPLv3 | |
| FFTW | A library for computing the DFT (SSE/SSE2/AVX/Altivec/ARM Neon). (Src) | GPL-2.0 | cmake |
| FMOD | An easy to use cross-platform audio engine and audio content creation tool for games. | Free for non-commercial/Commercial | cmake |
| KFR | A fast, modern, C++17, open-source, cross-platform DSP/DFT framework, supports Audio resampling, FIR/IIR filters, Biquad, (SSE, AVX, AVX-512, ARM NEON). (Src) | GPL-2.0 | cmake |
| libsoundio | A C library for cross-platform real-time audio input and output. (Src) | MIT | cmake |
| Maximilian | C++ Audio and Music DSP Library. | MIT | cmake |
| Miniaudio | An audio playback and capture C library. (Src) | Unlicense | single source file |
| ni-media | C++ library for reading and writing audio files. | MIT | cmake, vcpkg |
| OpenAL | A cross-platform audio API. | BSD/LGPL/Proprietary | cmake |
| PortAudio | PortAudio is a free, cross-platform, open-source, audio I/O library. (Src) | MIT | cmake, vcpkg |
| rnnoise | Recurrent neural network for audio noise reduction. | BSD-3-Clause | make |
| SELA | SimplE Lossless Audio. | MIT | cmake |
| SoLoud | Easy, portable audio engine for games. | zlib | |
| Soundtouch | The SoundTouch is an open-source cross-platform audio processing library for changing the Tempo, Pitch and Playback Rates of audio streams or audio files. (Src) | LGPL-2.1 | make |
| Tonic | Easy and efficient audio synthesis in C++. | Unlicense | |
| Verovio | A fast and lightweight music notation engraving library. (Src) | LGPL | cmake, qmake |
| Wav2Letter++ | A fast speech recognition toolkit written entirely in C++ and uses the ArrayFire tensor library and the flashlight machine learning library for maximum efficiency. | BSD License | cmake |
- CD
| Library | Description | License | Configuration |
|---|---|---|---|
| libkcompactdisc | A library for interfacing with CDs | GPL v2.0 | cmake |
- Fingerprinting
| Library | Description | License | Configuration |
|---|---|---|---|
| chromaprint | The Chromaprint is an audio fingerprint library designed to identify near-identical audio. It trades precision and robustness for search performance. Chromaprint can use multiple FFT libraries - FFmpeg, FFTW3, KissFFT or vDSP. (Src) | MIT, LGPL 2.1 | cmake |
| libmusicbrainz | The MusicBrainz Client Library (libmusicbrainz), also known as mb_client, is a development library geared towards developers who wish to add MusicBrainz lookup capabilities to their applications. The library supports Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (Src) | LGPL-2.1 | cmake |
| libofa | An open-source audio fingerprint by MusicIP | APL | make |
- Formats
| Library | Description | License | Configuration |
|---|---|---|---|
| AudioFile | A simple C++ library for reading and writing audio files. | MIT | cmake |
| audio_file | A library that handles reading and writing audio files in many common formats. (Src) | LGPL-2.1 | make |
| dr_libs | Single-file audio (FLAC, MP3, WAV) decoding libraries for C and C++. | Unlicense | |
| flac | The FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, meaning that audio compressed in FLAC has no loss in quality. FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, non-proprietary, and unencumbered by patents. | Open Source, BSD, GPL | |
| LAME | LAME is a high quality MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) encoder. | LGPL | |
| libsndfile | A C library with C++ wrapper for reading and writing files containing sampled sound (e.g. WAV, AIFF) through one standard library interface. (Src) | LGPL-2.1 | cmake, make, vcpkg |
| minimp3 | Minimalistic MP3 decoder | CC0-1.0 | header-only |
| Opus | A totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. | BSD | cmake |
| Vorbis | Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format. | BSD | cmake |
- Tagging
| Library | Description | License | Configuration |
|---|---|---|---|
| id3lib | An open-source, cross-platform library for reading, writing, and manipulating ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags, and retrieving some basic mp3 header info like bitrate. However, we now recommend moving to taglib :) | LGPL v2 | |
| taglib | The TagLib Audio Metadata Library is a library for reading and editing the meta-data of several popular audio formats: ID3v1, ID3v2 for MP3 files, Ogg Vorbis comments and ID3 tags and Vorbis comments in FLAC, MPC, Speex, WavPack, TrueAudio, WAV, AIFF, MP4 and ASF files. (Src) | LGPL and MPL v1.1 |
[edit] Benchmarking
| Library | Description | License | Configuration |
|---|---|---|---|
| benchmark | A library to benchmark code snippets, similar to unit tests | Apache 2.0 | cmake |
| Celero | A feature-rich C++ Benchmark Authoring Library/Framework. Supports Windows, Linux, and OSX using C++11. | Apache | cmake |
| Criterion | A micro-benchmarking library for modern C++ | MIT | header-only; cmake |
| gperftools | The 'Google Performance Tools' includes a high-performance, multi-threaded malloc implementation plus tools for benchmarking heap allocation and CPU utilization. | BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" | configure |
| nanobench | A simple, fast, accurate single-header micro-benchmarking functionality for C++11/14/17/20. (Src) | MIT | header-only; cmake |
| picobench | A tiny (micro) micro-benchmarking library | MIT | header-only; cmake |
| plf::nanotimer | A lowest-overhead, cross-platform simple timer class for benchmarking. | zlib | header-only |
[edit] Communication
| Library | Description | License | Configuration |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACE | Asynchronous networking, event de-multiplexing, messaging (Src) (Doc) |