Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Advent of Distributed Systems
Hey! I built a playground called Advent of Distributed Systems (https://aods.cryingpotato.com/) where you can work through the Fly.io distributed systems challenges (https://fly.io/dist-sys/1/) directly in your browser. Running challenges like this directly in the browser has often been the best way for me to get the activation energy to start them since it bypasses all the annoying dev environment setup that has to happen as a precursor to working on it. The coding environment was built with another project I'm working on called Cannon…
Advent of Distributed Systems is a browser-based playground for working through Fly.io's distributed systems challenges without local environment setup. Built for developers learning distributed systems concepts, it… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Advent of Distributed Systems launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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Wing Playground▲253Iterate on cloud apps in milliseconds, not minutes
2024 · winglang.io · its alternatives →
- 2IB
I've been working on an MMORPG that is now in alpha as a solo developer. Here are the major open source technologies that I use: Blender - 3D modeling software for creating the overall environment and every game object. I've gotten a lot of CC and Public Domain assets from https://poly.pizza GLTF - I export assets from blender to the GLTF asset format JSON - I write a JSON config for every game object that describes things like its name, its interactions, its collisions, etc. Node.js exporter - I iterate over the environment and every asset to create a scene hierarchy. I use…
2024 · alpha.reconquer.online · its alternatives →
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Modd.io is a collaborative game editor that runs in browser. It's kind of like Figma for game dev. We made this engine low-code and multiplayer-first, so developeres can quickly prototype casual multiplayer games. I hope some of you guys will find this useful. Would love to hear feedback also. Thank you. Engine Demo: https://www.modd.io
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Earlier this year, we released our open-source game engine [0] built with Rust, WebAssembly, and WebGPU. Today, we’re happy to announce the Ambient platform, which brings web deployment, server hosting, and more to the runtime. With Ambient, you can make a game, deploy it to the browser in one command, share your URL and instantly play with others, no downloads or installs needed. Our WASM use is innovative; it is being used as both a sandboxed runtime for user code, and as a way to run the entire Ambient runtime in the browser. This, paired with our ECS data model, enables a highly modular…
2023 · ambient.run · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! Thanks for your attention to my post. It was a big challenge to run most of Node.js packages in browser, fast moreover. Virtual File system, resolve import/export. I got cold many times, depressions, burned out, yet still alive and finished it. Many guys helped me with an advice. Many users give a lot of positive feedback. There are 200,000 monthly unique users. I work full time now because of the freemium business model. To be honest - I am happy after many years of hard work.
2022 · playcode.io · its alternatives →
- 6IM
I've posted this game here before, hopefully a repost is fine as the game has changed quite a bit (improved AI, improved mapeditor, much quicker gameplay, etc). Game is based on JavaScript/Canvas and WebSockets. On the browser side the map is pre-rendered (as a background image), just the mobile units/buildings and animations are dynamically rendered. The lobby server is made in node.js, but the game server is C++ for performance reasons (mainly the pathfinding). I found the C++ WebSocket libraries out there to be too difficult to use so I made my own based on the rfc. Overall I…
2022 · battle-of-flags.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! We’re Arne and Raban, the founders of Emdash (https://github.com/generalaction/emdash). Emdash is an open-source and provider-agnostic desktop app that lets you run multiple coding agents in parallel, each isolated in its own git worktree, either locally or over SSH on a remote machine. We call it an Agentic Development Environment (ADE). You can see a 1 minute demo here: https://youtu.be/X31nK-zlzKo We are building Emdash for ourselves. While working on a cap-table management application (think Stripe Atlas + Pulley), we found our development…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, we build an open-source operating system extension for orchestrating robot swarms fully decentralized. This first beta version allows you to create fully decentralized robot swarms. The system will set up a wireless mesh network and run a p2p networking stack on top of it, such that nodes can interact with each other through various abstractions using our SDKs (Rust, Python, TypeScript) or a CLI. We hope this is a step toward better inter-robot communication (and a fun project if you have a few Raspberry Pis lying around). Our mesh network is created by B.A.T.M.A.N.-adv and we’ve…
2025 · docs.p2p.industries · its alternatives →
- 9MP
I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →
- 10
I'd like to share a project I've been working on for the past few months. It's a distributed workflow engine written entirely in Go. Some highlights: * Tasks are executed in a Docker container * Can run stand-alone or distributed * Highly extensible * Able to enforce limits (CPU/RAM) per task * Web UI Would love the get your feedback on it, and find out if this could be useful.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Classic physics engine algorithms — SAT collision detection and Morton Z-curve indexing — become viable on-chain primitives only where the execution model supports dynamic object access at runtime. Here's why EVM, Solana, and Aptos can't run them, and Sui can.
Apr 2026 · docs.merca.earth · its alternatives →
- 12OA
Hey HN! I went to an ATProto meetup last week, and as a burnt-out semi-academic who hates academic publishing, I thought there might be a cool opportunity to build on Octopus (https://www.octopus.ac/), so I got a bit excited over the weekend and built Octosphere. Hopefully some of you find it interesting! Blog post here: https://andreasthinks.me/posts/octosphere/octosphere.html
Feb 2026 · octosphere.social · its alternatives →
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Inspired by Compiler Explorer and other playground/fiddle websites like jsfiddle, db-fiddle, Go playground, and Rust playground, I thought it would be cool to have a playground for nearly any program so I've been working on Program Explorer: a playground for running programs from containers. I am inspired by these playgrounds because they are great educational tools for quickly experimenting and as communication tools by sharing shortlinks that reproduce bugs for instance. I would love for every open source project that publishes a container to get their own playground for free. I'm…
2025 · programexplorer.org · its alternatives →
- 14BY
Hey HN! I spent the last year building a programming challenges site targeted at intermediate/advanced programmers [1]. Challenges follow the "Build your own X" format, where you learn about a popular open source tool by building a small version yourself (popularized by this Github repo [2]). The primary difference compared to other coding challenge websites like Codecademy, HackerRank, Exercism etc. is that we offer real-world programming challenges - no inverting binary trees here! I've posted about this multiple times here before, but haven't managed to gather much interest. Trying…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 15OA
it won't let me put url for some reason, here it is: https://github.com/octopii-rs/octopii
Nov 2025 · its alternatives →
- 16
I've been a big fan of fly.io with it’s devx, but cold starts and pricing have been a consistent problem. Even for side projects it's painful if they take 30s to load, it just kills the whole experience. With coding agents becoming good, there were a lot more things I started building, and I just wanted to run all of those things! GCI was built to solve this. It’s just a CLI, just uses ssh to interact with your target machine, and relies on docker swarm to get your services running (docker swarm is IMO underrated, providing benefits even with a single node). It can deploy on any machine that…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17CA
Imagine you have to make a little change in all your microservices, like changing a line in Dockerfile, but you have 50 microservices, ouch right! The PRs, pipelines, reviews... I have created a dashboard with a chatbot where you can simply ask "Update all repositories with alpine base image version X to Y", and then click next a bunch of time and see a list of PRs with their pipeline status. Hi friends I'm Daniel, the creator of Infra as AI. I was laid off from my SRE role a couple of months ago, and decided to build something that could always help me at work. My job was to keep the lights…
2025 · infrastructureas.ai · its alternatives →
- 18
Link: https://docs.trysoma.ai/ For the past ~9 months I’ve been building Soma, an open-source AI agent & workflow runtime written in Rust, with a TypeScript SDK (Python coming soon). It’s not a framework; it’s meant to sit underneath whatever agent/tooling code you already write (Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, custom code, etc.). It provides features around your framework + a better DX for building agents. I’ve tried to take a Next.JS model: open-source, good DX, self-deployable. I originally set out to build a vertical back-office/operations product for SMEs. I needed a…
Dec 2025 · docs.trysoma.ai · its alternatives →
- 19OS
Kshitij and Rahul here. We're building Playground, an open-source sandbox that lets your non-technical teams prototype directly on production codebases, without bugging you (developers) to spin up and maintain another repo. The repo is here: https://github.com/B1u3B01t/design-playground. We've been working together for six years. Last year we built an AI design agent because we thought designers were the biggest bottleneck. But we were wrong. After talking to teams, we realised designers, PMs, founders and even sales people all wanted to quickly change and explore flows…
Jul 2026 · its alternatives →
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A platform for building games of ‘unprecedented size’
2017 · its alternatives →
- 21
Hi HN, A lot of the dev teams I have worked with had a lot of issues with their documentation. In fact, some of my easiest clients to get were from clients that had "black box" solutions that devs no longer at the company had created. Personally, writing documentation is like grinding nails on a chalkboard. I have been having a lot of fun with building solutions that can run in a distributed way, not something a dev needs to run themselves. And after a significant amount of testing and building out several different solutions, I finally have a solution that is easy to set up and runs in the…
Dec 2025 · codesummary.io · its alternatives →
- 22SS
I built a realistic prod system under heavy pressure where you SSH in and solve real problems. You get your own server (real box) and have to fix various things up under fire. a friend told me it reminded them of DOOM for SREs, another called it a "flight simulator" because you can do anything (and reboot if you crash). someone else said it was like "an escape room for engineers", in that you have to find your own way around an unfamiliar box and solve puzzles. idk, maybe it's fun. try it! how it works: you get two Hetzner servers: a traffic generator (real traffic from NYC taxi data highly…
2025 · simstack.io · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I'm one of the engine programmers at All Out Games (https://allout.game/), a multiplayer-first gaming UGC platform where creators can make and play games with their friends. For scripting we wanted our creators to be able to jump in and create game mechanics without having to think about networking. If a developer had to manually send packets to/from client/server to get things to happen then we have failed. It is particularly bad if you are using AI tools because they struggle to keep in mind what code is meant to run where (client, server, or both) and…
Mar 2026 · docs.allout.game · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Wing Playground alternatives
- I built an indie, browser-based MMORPG alternatives
- I'm open-sourcing my game engine alternatives
- Ambient, a multiplayer game engine and platform using WASM/WebGPU/Rust alternatives
- I've been making JavaScript sandbox alone for 6 years alternatives
- I made a browser-based RTS game alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →