A C/C++ IDE written in C from scratch with zero dependencies
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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.
HN · launched Mar 22, 2026 · 10 upvotes (top 42%) · 1 view
Niche: software development environments · 118 launches, 13 in the last 7 days ▲ +8% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 118 launches in software development environments →
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 : 264 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #123 of 265 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 142 days after the earliest competitor.
- turbo-c-plus-plus-ide · github · 2026-11-10 · 102 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++ · hn · 2026-04-09 · 177 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- visual-studio-2013-ide · github · 2026-11-10 · 102 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- C/C++ Cheatsheet · hn · 2026-01-23 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- I built a small browser engine from scratch in C++ · hn · 2026-01-28 · 146 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- CJIT, a single-binary C compiler that can self host · hn · 2026-04-13 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Browser-based .NET IDE with visual designer, NuGet packages, code share · hn · 2026-02-26 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Cicada · hn · 2026-01-30 · 57 upvotes · similarity 0.46
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