A C/C++ IDE written in C from scratch with zero dependencies
Details
- External ID
- 47481938
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- A C/C++ IDE written in C from scratch with zero dependencies
- Website domain
- itch.io
- Launched
- March 22, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 10
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5781057810578106
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I’ve spent the last ~2 years building a C/C++ IDE for Windows entirely in C99. My goal was to eliminate the bloat of the modern Visual Studio environment keeping its core features.Key Technical Highlights:Zero Dependencies: Just the Windows APIPerformance: Starts in 0.1ms on a twelve year old machine. It handles projects with 500k+ lines without UI lag or indexing stutters.Integrated Tools: Includes a custom-built debugger, profiler, and Intellisense engine designed for speed.Portability: It’s a single executable. No installer required.I built this because I was tired of waiting 10 seconds for Visual Studio to "wake up" and seeing my RAM disappear just to boot it up. It’s currently hosted on itch.io while I gather funds to set up a dedicated site.
Enrichment
- Theme
- Claude integrations and coding agents
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- c/c++ ide with zero dependencies
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building a high-performance C/C++ IDE written strictly in C99 with zero external dependencies directly against the Win32 API requires specialized low-level systems programming that AI assistance cannot substitute for.
What it would actually take: The system is written entirely in C99 communicating directly with the Win32 API (User32, GDI/DirectWrite) without external runtime dependencies. The hard technical parts are writing a custom high-performance text buffer (such as a piece table or rope data structure), text layout and rendering engines, asynchronous process management for compilers, and debugger integration (PDB parsing, Win32 debugging APIs). This requires years of systems programming mastery and deep OS-level Windows internals knowledge.
Discussion
4 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: CMake, Ninja, MSBuild, Make
Concerns raised: Proper C++ parsing and include handling without build system communication, LSP integration defies original design purpose, Limited language support beyond C/C++
Feature requests: Full LSP integration, Support for additional programming languages
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 117 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #52 of 118 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 139 days after the earliest competitor.
- I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++ · hn · 2026-04-09 · 177 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- C/C++ Cheatsheet · hn · 2026-01-23 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- I built a small browser engine from scratch in C++ · hn · 2026-01-28 · 146 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Browser-based .NET IDE with visual designer, NuGet packages, code share · hn · 2026-02-26 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Cicada · hn · 2026-01-30 · 57 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- CJIT, a single-binary C compiler that can self host · hn · 2026-04-13 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Cj–tiny no-deps JIT in C for x86-64 and ARM64 · hn · 2025-11-05 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- CForge · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.