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What are some interesting C/C++ libraries to play around with?

Asked 2011-03-10T13:59:10.080
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I'm looking for a few new libraries and for C and C++. In the past most of the time I "accidently" stumbled across a few - and most of them found good use in projects I worked on.

Libraries should run on Mac OS X and Linux/POSIX and possibly on Windows.

  • Lua - A minimal and fast scripting engine for configuration files and basic application scripting.
  • V8 - A fast JavaScript by Google engine similar to WebKit's JavaScriptCore.
  • Cairo - A good graphcis library similar to QuickDraw/Quartz on Mac OS X.
  • ZBar - A barcode scanner library, which allows to scan photos/images/video streams for barcodes and return their value.
  • ZLib - A very compact compression library for data streams. Used zziblib and minizip, too.
  • DynaPDF - A easy-to-use PDF generation library.
  • libusb - A universal USB library which allows for portable access to USB devices (I used this to write a basic driver for a custom POS printer).
  • WebKit - This is a really nice one if you want to render HTML/Web contents and use it in applications to give your users a "richer" user experience.
  • Qt4 - The general purpose framework for all kinds of desktop (and possibly mobile) development. Spending a lot of my time with that - no idea how I could forget that. ;)

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Boost but not the productive part :)

Boost.Xpressive or how to encode regular expressions in templates!

Boost.MPL will shed a new light on the use of template, you'll get a finer grok of template metaprogramming and dug deeper into the subtleties of SFINAE and template deduction.

Boost.Preprocessor will shed a new light on the use and abuse of the preprocessor. It comes very handy when using templates to generate multiple overloads of template functions and classes (and indeed the MPL is based upon it). The interest somewhat dwindle though with the advent of...

C++0x!

The new Standard Library with its threads!

Learn to use std::future and std::function, discover the joy of lambdas, the range-based for syntax, the auto keyword!

C++0x has so many new toys that it almost feels like a new language... and it's also a good brush of your old skills and a good way to stay in.

answered 2011-03-10T16:18:17.727

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