Ask HN: What are your favorite obscure but brilliant C/C++ libraries?
6 months ago
I’ve been exploring C and C++ libraries lately and realized there are so many hidden gems out there that rarely get mentioned.
What are your favorite lesser-known libraries — ones that you think more people should know about? They could be tiny, single-header utilities, niche domain tools, or just something that made you go “wow” when you found it.
Libpostal - street address parsing and normalisation library that relies on downloadable NLP model.
https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal
The judy array library is amazing for hardcore high performance with large memory resident data structures in C, and now there's no more patent on it. Somebody on here took issue when I asked about it once. Disclaimer: no, you don't need judy arrays and no they aren't better than your favorite thing.
https://judy.sourceforge.net/
I mostly use basic libraries, but I do like the ideas coming from Abseil and GSL. A longer list is available here: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/links/libs