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Top 23 C++ HacktoberFest Projects
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Windows Terminal
The new Windows Terminal and the original Windows console host, all in the same place!
Y'know, I spent a week investigating doing something similar with the Windows Terminal about 18 months ago: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/16495#issuecomm...
There's even more under the "Updates archive" expando in that post.
It was a pretty compelling prototype. But after I played with Polyglot Notebooks[1], I pretty much just abandoned that experiment. There's a _lot_ of UI that needs to be written to build a notebook-like experience. But the Polyglot notebooks took care of that by just converting the commandline backend to a jupyter kernel.
I've been writing more and more script-like experiments in those ever since. Just seems so much more natural to have a big-ol doc full of notes, that just so happens to also have play buttons to Do The Thing.
[1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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How does it compare to Tesseract? https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract
I use ocrmypdf (which uses Tesseract). Runs locally and is absolutely fantastic. https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
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ImHex
🔍 A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers, Programmers and people who value their retinas when working at 3 AM.
- Project mention: Inside PostHog: SSRF, ClickHouse SQL Escape and Default Postgres Creds to RCE | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-12-17
hey this is the author. Thanks for everyones comment here guys.
There as a actually a vulnerability Clickhouse, which helps you to execute any query on the remote postgresl. By default, you can't execute any random query! This bug was seperately reported to the Clickhouse and has been fixed seperately https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/74144/commits/...
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- Project mention: Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-12-01
how to add "hardened_malloc" memory allocator support to emscripten for WASM? https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+add+%22hardened_mallo...
"Import custom memory manager?" · Issue #24851 · emscripten-core/emscripten https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/24851
Just learned about Cage:
Cage does Hardware-Accelerated Safe WebAssembly (WASM) with LLVM with support for ARM64 Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) and Pointer Authentication (PAC) memory safety features.
"Cage: Hardware-Accelerated Safe WebAssembly" (2024)
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Solidity
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Stream
Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video. Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
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keepassxc
KeePassXC is a cross-platform community-driven port of the Windows application “KeePass Password Safe”.
> Care to cite this statement?
Yes, literally from you: "Passkeys should never be allowed to be exported in clear text." https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407 Also, "You absolutely should be preventing users from being able to copy a private key!"
> You can use any credential manager you choose. You don't have to use Apple Passwords / iCloud Keychain.
But I want to use Apple Passwords.
- Project mention: Show HN: Network Monitor – a GUI to spot anomalous connections on your Linux | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-11-24
Cool project, I wish we had more GUIs for these OS functions. How was your experience with GTK4 and Rust?
And it's a bit sad that in the year of our lord 2025, the best way to get such fundamental information is by using regexes to parse a table[1], generated by a 6000-line C program[2], which is verified by (I hope I'm wrong!) a tiny test suite[3]. OSQuery[4] is also pretty cool, but it builds upon this fragile stack.
That's something I miss from Windows, at least PowerShell has built-in commands that give you structured output.
[1] https://github.com/grigio/network-monitor/blob/9dc470553bfdd...
[2] https://github.com/iproute2/iproute2/blob/main/misc/ss.c
[3] https://github.com/iproute2/iproute2/blob/main/testsuite/tes...
[4] https://osquery.io/
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Kodi Home Theater Software
Kodi is an award-winning free and open source home theater/media center software and entertainment hub for digital media. With its beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine, it's available for Android, BSD, Linux, macOS, iOS, tvOS and Windows.
Project mention: This class is primarily for Python support (hence the "Retarded" prefix). | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-08-29 -
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Marlin
Marlin is a firmware for RepRap 3D printers optimized for both 8 and 32 bit microcontrollers. Marlin supports all common platforms. Many commercial 3D printers come with Marlin installed. Check with your vendor if you need source code for your specific machine.
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It allows using the browser as a very convenient and accessible programming platform for many types of applications, not only web-based. That's specially important for beginners, I think, as they can run (and create) all kind of projects just by opening a web page. But it is also very handy for more advanced users, as the wled project [1] shows.
And yes, there are security implications. But that's true for any other platform and as long as the users are asked for the proper permissions, I'm good with it.
[1] https://kno.wled.ge/
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- Project mention: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-12-03
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Nice!
A couple of years ago, I tried something in that direction[1] using Phaser[2], and it was quite fun. I used Tiled Editor[3] to create the map and some pixel art that I purchased from itch.io.
[1] - https://story.tuzemec.com (not very mobile friendly)
[2] - https://phaser.io
[3] - https://www.mapeditor.org/
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Minetest
Luanti (formerly Minetest) is an open source voxel game-creation platform with easy modding and game creation
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NebulaGraph Database
A distributed, fast open-source graph database featuring horizontal scalability and high availability (by vesoft-inc)
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Cataclysm-DDA
Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead. A turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world.
Project mention: Ask HN: Which Do you know any open source games? | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-08-10 -
You see, for the past several years I have used many programming languages and many more game frameworks and libraries. Programming languages like Java, C#, C++, and even, sadly, JavaScript (I know...). Game frameworks like LWJGL, SDL2, Raylib, MonoGame, SFML, and many more. Essentially, I have seen it all. Out of all of them, I think SDL2 was closer to what I was looking for, though, Raylib was the one I used the most at the beginning. And the reason I liked SDL more was because it was more"lower-level" than Raylib or SFML. Additionally, it had that C-style of programming that I have always been fond of. However, despite that, I decided to go against any of these libraries.
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manticoresearch
Easy to use open source fast database for search | Good alternative to Elasticsearch now | Drop-in replacement for E in the ELK stack
Project mention: Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-07-23The Manticore Search github repository calls it a "drop-in replacement for E in the ELK stack," not just a replacement for Elasticsearch. On https://manticoresearch.com/, it's described as an "Elasticsearch alternative," so the confusion is probably just here on HN :)
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wslg
Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios
*Yes, I know, WSLG exists and is actually goated...
- Project mention: Building a Professional PX4 Development Environment with Docker, ROS2, and VS Code | dev.to | 2025-11-01
#!/bin/bash set -e echo "Setting up PX4 development environment..." cd /home/developer/workspace # Clone PX4 Autopilot if not present if [ ! -d "PX4-Autopilot" ]; then echo "Cloning PX4-Autopilot release 1.14..." git clone -b release/1.14 https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot.git --recursive fi # Create ROS2 workspace structure mkdir -p ros2_ws/src cd ros2_ws/src # Clone px4_msgs - the message definitions PX4 uses if [ ! -d "px4_msgs" ]; then git clone -b release/1.14 https://github.com/PX4/px4_msgs.git fi # Clone px4_ros_com - examples and utilities for PX4-ROS2 integration if [ ! -d "px4_ros_com" ]; then git clone -b release/v1.14 https://github.com/PX4/px4_ros_com.git fi
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SaaSHub
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NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C++ HacktoberFest discussion
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- A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub www.saashub.com | 22 Dec 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source HacktoberFest projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Windows Terminal | 101,132 |
| 2 | tesseract-ocr | 71,465 |
| 3 | ImHex | 52,046 |
| 4 | ClickHouse | 44,744 |
| 5 | flameshot | 28,491 |
| 6 | emscripten | 27,054 |
| 7 | solidity | 25,447 |
| 8 | keepassxc | 25,222 |
| 9 | OSQuery | 22,960 |
| 10 | Kodi Home Theater Software | 20,207 |
| 11 | rpcs3 | 17,858 |
| 12 | Marlin | 17,192 |
| 13 | WLED | 17,151 |
| 14 | polybar | 15,082 |
| 15 | OpenRCT2 | 14,925 |
| 16 | tiled | 12,195 |
| 17 | Minetest | 12,146 |
| 18 | NebulaGraph Database | 11,907 |
| 19 | Cataclysm-DDA | 11,860 |
| 20 | SFML | 11,523 |
| 21 | manticoresearch | 11,488 |
| 22 | wslg | 11,376 |
| 23 | PX4-Autopilot | 10,705 |
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