Alternatives
Products that do what Bedrock – An 8-bit computing system for running programs anywhere does
Hey everyone, this is my latest project. Bedrock is a lightweight program runtime: programs assemble down to a few kilobytes of bytecode that can run on any computer, console, or handheld. The runtime is tiny, it can be implemented from scratch in a few hours, and the I/O devices for accessing the keyboard, screen, networking, etc. can be added on as needed. I designed Bedrock to make it easier to maintain programs as a solo developer. It's deeply inspired by Uxn and PICO-8, but it makes significant departures from Uxn to provide more capabilities to programs and to be easier to…
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2020 · bedrock.io
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A year ago, my co-founder launched Desktop Docs here on HN. It's a Mac app we built with Electron that uses CLIP embeddings to search photos and videos locally with natural language. We got positive feedback from HN and our first paying customers, but the app was almost 1GB and clunky to use. TLDR; rebuilding in Rust was the right move. So we rewrote the app with Rust and Tauri and here are the results: - App size is 83% smaller: 1GB → 172MB - DMG Installer is 70% smaller: 232MB → 69.5MB - Indexing files is faster: A 38-minute video now indexes in ~3 minutes instead of 10-14 minutes -…
2025 · desktopdocs.com
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2024 · github.com
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2013 · redstone.io
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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
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Hi HN, I've been building Nucleus, a lightweight Linux container runtime focused on two workloads: ephemeral AI-agent sandboxes and declarative NixOS services. It's a single Rust binary, no daemon. It is not a Docker replacement and not a strict subset of Docker either. I dropped the entire image-and-distribution half (no Dockerfile, no layers, no registry, no pull/push, no persistent storage layer) in exchange for going deeper on isolation and reproducibility. The rootfs is either a directory copied into tmpfs (agent mode) or a Nix-built closure mounted read-only (production mode). If…
Jun 2026 · github.com
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Chunk co-founder here. We spent the last 2 weeks building this to scratch our own itch: As developers, we often have problems that could be solved just by running a few lines of code. Sometimes, running this code on your local machine is fine. But other time, the code need to run automatically reacting to external events or to run continuously, which means, it needs to run on a server somewhere. So now, you have to find a cloud provider, to package or build the code and finally to deploy it. All of that for what could be literally be 4 lines of code. We couldn’t find an easier way to do…
2022 · chunk.run
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I'm excited to introduce Zerobox, a cross-platform, single binary process sandboxing CLI written in Rust. It uses the sandboxing crates from the OpenAI Codex repo and adds additional functionalities like secret injection, SDK, etc. Watch the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZiPm9BOPCg Zerobox follows the same sandboxing policy as Deno which is deny by default. The only operation that the command can run is reading files, all writes and network I/O are blocked by default. No VMs, no Docker, no remote servers. Want to block reads to /etc? zerobox…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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We'd love to share our work with you: Restate, a system for workflows-as-code (durable execution). With SDKs in JS/Java/Kotlin and a lightweight runtime built in Rust/Tokio. https://github.com/restatedev/ https://restate.dev/ It is free and open, SDKs are MIT-licensed, runtime permissive BSL (basically just the minimal Amazon defense). We worked on that for a bit over a year. A few points I think are worth mentioning: - Restate's runtime is a single binary, self-contained, no dependencies aside from a durable disk. It contains basically a…
2024 · restate.dev
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2019 · github.com
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2025 · mackow.ski
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2022 · runno.dev
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Hi HN — I’m learning Rust and decided to build a universal CLI for running code in many languages. The tool, Run, aims to be a single, minimal dependency utility for: running one-off snippets (from CLI flags), running files, reading and executing piped stdin, and providing language-specific REPLs that you can switch between interactively. I designed it to support both interpreted languages (Python, JS, Ruby, etc.) and compiled languages (Rust, Go, C/C++). It detects languages from flags or file extensions, can compile temporary files for compiled languages, and exposes a unified REPL…
Oct 2025 · github.com
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A fast, rootless sandbox and virtual resource runtime for any workload, including untrusted and AI-generated code. Daemonless: a real, kernel-enforced container in ~3.5 ms from an OCI image, out of one static binary - getkern/kern
13d ago · github.com
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Show HN: TinyWasm - A tiny WebAssembly Runtime written in Rust Hi HN! I'm excited to share TinyWasm (https://github.com/explodingcamera/tinywasm), a WebAssembly Interpreter I developed for my final university project. The main goal of this project was to deepen my understanding of WebAssembly and interpreter design. TinyWasm successfully passes all the official WebAssembly 1.0 tests and also includes features from future proposals such as like bulk memory operations. Initially more of a research project, TinyWasm focuses on simplicity and portability. It has minimal…
2024 · github.com
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We've been building Crust (https://crustjs.com/), a TypeScript-first, Bun-native CLI framework with zero dependencies. It's been powering our core product internally for a while, and we're now open-sourcing it. The problem we kept running into: existing CLI frameworks in the JS ecosystem are either minimal arg parsers where you wire everything yourself, or heavyweight frameworks with large dependency trees and Node-era assumptions. We wanted something in between. What Crust does differently: - Full type inference from definitions — args and flags are inferred automatically. No…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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