Icarus

Icarus
A whole IDE in a 2.6mb single exe file (Windows, MacOS and Linux)
Giovannicarlino
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Everything you need from your development environment (except for the compiler) in a ~600 kb executable with no external dependencies.

What you get:

  1. Multi-tab code editor with syntax highlighting, find/replace, find in files, undo/redo, bracket matching, code folding, duplicate line, and comment toggling.

  2. Project system with templates for Console, Windows GUI, DLL, static library, and header-only projects.

  3. Build and run with Debug/Release and platform targets.

  4. Integrated native debugger with breakpoints, step controls, call stack, watches, disassembly, and profiler panels.

  5. Split editing views, file browser, output/error panels, multiple themes, and font choices.

Inspired by Casey Muratori, Ryan Fleury and many other Handmade Network people.

The main motivation behind Icarus is having a full C/C++ development environment that includes everything needed to build and debug software and is small, super fast and extremely reliable.

Built in C99, with MSVC, the only dependencies are Direct2D and DirectWrite on Windows. SDL3, SDL3_ttf on Linux and MacOS

AI Policy

Icarus uses AI in a very limited way, e.g. research and boilerplate since 2026.

I used AI more frequently on the project around mid-2025 (not vibecoding, I've always reviewed and edited output), STILL, the results have been disastrous on the codebase, I'm still fixing duplications and a bunch stupid mistakes it made.