

Ask HN: What are the top open source software written in C? - anujkk

I'm looking for top open source softwares written in C (excluding linux kernel) for learning by code reading. AFAIK, Apache Web Server, Gnome, GIMP and parts of firefox are written in C. Do you know of any other interesting open source projects using C as their development language?
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jordandanford
Many interpreted programming languages are implemented in C: Python, Ruby,
Lua, Io...

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jfaucett
Glad to hear someone wants to learn by reading source! I personally think this
is a thousand times better than reading any book about programming languages.

to answer your question, pretty much anything at GNU, coreutils, binutils,
bash, grep, etc. here's the link: <http://www.gnu.org/software/>

Also I'd recommend reading the redis source, its an easy read and well
designed. Also emacs if your also interested in lisp or text-editing ( still
difficult portions are written in c ). And if you're a chess fan check out the
GNU chess project, for games then there's quake 3 src - which was my first
completed c source read.

good reading!

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matthewowen
redis: <https://github.com/antirez/redis/>

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tsahyt
Not exactly an open-source project but id software releases their source code
under the GPL license after a couple of years. So you might want to have a
look at the sources of say, Doom or Quake. Both of them were written in C. In
fact everything they did up to Doom 3 (C++) is C code if I remember correctly.

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grn
I can recommend git (<https://github.com/git/git>) and Plan9
(<http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/>). Both are pleasure to
read.

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davyjones
SQLite, PostgreSQL.

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ralph
lcc(1) the C compiler. As well as having readable C source, you'd learn
something about the innards of C, how it is implemented, and there's a good
accompanying book by Fraser and Hanson that covers the complete source as a
"literate program". <https://github.com/drh/lcc/blob/master/src/lex.c>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805316701/mqq-20>

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anywherenotes
libxml2 <http://www.xmlsoft.org/> XML parser, used a lot, so probably well
coded. Likely smaller code-size than some of the more famous gnu products.

zlib <http://zlib.net/> zip library, used a lot, so ... hmm same thing as
above.

zlib contains both zip-specific logic (which maybe hard to understand if you
don't know how compression works), and also IO-logic which is pretty straight
forward.

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sea6ear
I've looked at the C source to Tcl/Tk and Lua and was impressed by both. I
believe Vim is also written in C.

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tait
Are you familiar with Koders.com?

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cperciva
FreeBSD.

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cleancode1
OpenBSD.

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stewie2
blender3d

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jfaucett
Are you sure this is written in c? I haven't looked at the source but the
design makes me think its c++

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toutoutastro
It's in python I think.

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jfaucett
ok, to wrap things up I downloaded the source, hobin and pestaa are right on -
its c with an embedded python interpreter for writing your own scripts.

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stewie2
i told u

