Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Cellarium: A Playground for Cellular Automata
Hey HN, just wanted to share a fun, vibe-coded Friday night experiment: a little playground for writing cellular automata in a subset of Rust, which is then compiled into WGSL. Since it lets you dynamically change parameters while the simulation is running via a TUI, it's easy to discover weird behaviors without remembering how you got there. If you press "s", it will save the complete history to a JSON file (a timeline of the parameters that were changed at given ticks), so you can replay it and regenerate the discovery. You can pan/zoom, and while the main simulation window is in…
Cellarium is a playground for creating and experimenting with cellular automata using a Rust subset compiled to WGSL. Users can write automata code, adjust parameters in real-time via a text interface, and observe… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1IM
2018 · bitbucket.org · its alternatives →
- 2
For the past three years I've been building what I hope will be the next Blender, tackling the lack of any good 2D design or image editing tools outside the Adobe monopoly. This was our first year participating in Google Summer of Code and this Q3 update includes the big payoff from that, covering the most progress we've made so far as a project. If you're a Rust dev, consider getting involved as we apply for the next GSoC in the new year— you could be our intern next summer :) Q3 progress report: https://graphite.rs/blog/graphite-progress-report-q3-2024/
2024 · graphite.rs · its alternatives →
- 3TA
2014 · rileyjshaw.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Neural CAs model self-organizing pattern formation. Now they can generate patterns at HD resolution in real-time, enabled by turning each CA cell into a Neural Field. Try 3 demos: grow a pattern from a seed (and damage it, it heals), synthesize PBR textures that can regenerate, or create 3D textures like clouds.
Jun 2026 · cells2pixels.github.io · its alternatives →
- 5
Embedding Atlas▲150Hey HN, we're happy to release Mycelium, a JavaScript library for creating graph visualizations of machine learning models or any other directed acyclic graphs. Mycelium powers the graph viewer of the Talaria [0] a research model visualization and optimization system, which was used to optimize the efficiency of Apple Foundation Models [1]. Everything works entirely on the client-side in the browser — we provide a rudimentary ONNX loader out of the box, which you can try by dragging model files into our website. It is also simple to define loaders for your own model formats. The library was…
2025 · apple.github.io · its alternatives →
- 6
I was fascinated reading through another recent HN submission about a highly efficient implementation of A* in Lisp, which got me thinking about how I could do something similar in Python. However, these kinds of pathfinding algorithms really need complex terrain/mazes with interesting obstructions to showcase what they can do and how they work. So, I started thinking about how I could generate cool and diverse random "mazes" (they aren't really mazes, but I'm not sure what the best term is). I got a bit carried away thinking of lots of different cool ways to generate these mazes, such…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7II
2019 · ericu.github.io · its alternatives →
- 8MP
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 →
- 9AA
This is a weekend project that spiraled out of control. I was originally trying to get Claude to play a ROM of the SNES SimCity. I struggled with it and that led me to Micropolis (the open-sourced SimCity engine) and was able to get it to work by bolting on an API. The weekend hack turned into a headless city simulation platform where anyone can get an API key (no signup) and have their AI agent play mayor. The simulation runs the real Micropolis engine inside Cloudflare Durable Objects, one per city. Every city is public and browsable on the site. LLMs are awful at the spatial stuff, which…
Feb 2026 · hallucinatingsplines.com · its alternatives →
- 10CY
2021 · aperocky.com · its alternatives →
- 11
"Game" is a stretch, but I put together this repo containing a pure Rust app which uses SDL2 and compiles to WASM (and can be run in a browser). Older resources were a bit out of date and a bit too verbose for my purposes, so here's a minimal working example.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Hey HN, this is Will and David from Fortress (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41426998). We use a lot of async Rust internally, and created this library out of a need for an async-aware concurrent hashmap since there weren’t many available in the Rust ecosystem. Whirlwind is a sharded HashMap with a fully asynchronous API. Just as dashmap is a replacement for std::sync::RwLock, whirlwind aims to be a replacement for tokio::sync::RwLock. It has a similar design and performance characteristics to dashmap, but seems to perform better in read-heavy workloads with tokio's…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
An interactive ecosystem and evolution simulator written in C and OpenGL, for GNU/Linux. - connor-brooks/ecosim
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Simple Rust implementation of Conway's Game of Life - brundonsmith/life
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15VA
VoxelChain is an experimental tool to create voxel worlds in the browser. The lighting is fully ray traced in real-time and there is powerful cellular-automata based programming system, which allows to create complex digital circuits and model the behaviour of voxels (behaviour such as falling sand or water). Technology wise, I'm using WebGL2 for the rendering and the simulation is coded in C89 and gets compiled to WebAssembly (with multi-threading) using Clang. The simulation is basically a custom cellular automaton and is fully parallelized. Once WebGPU is released, I'm planning to run the…
2022 · voxelchain.app · its alternatives →
- 16
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 →
- 17S2
2020 · ekzhang.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hi HN, when learning Golang (and topology), I ported a simple GOL in C (https://github.com/Jeadie/GoL) into Go. I then added a bunch of features - Playing on other fundamental polygons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_polygon#Examples_o...) - Considering all possible update rules (of which, there are many). Looking to get back to this project soon. Would love some feedback + ideas.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Hey HN! I'm Alex, a tech lead of the Selenium project and a QA engineer. For the last 10 months, I've been working on Alumnium - a test automation library that should make my life easier and let me write less code when automating the tests. The goal is to use LLM for _automating_ so I could focus more on _testing_. Unlike other similar projects, Alumnium can be used in existing tests without changes to test runners, reporting tools, or any other test infrastructure. This allows me to gradually migrate my test suites (mostly Selenium) and revert whenever something goes wrong (this happens a…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20CA
2019 · cgmnt-achilles-tortoise-piglet.netlify.com · its alternatives →
- 21
YC (S26) | Open Computer History | Record your screen continuously locally and provide context to your agents (Claude, Codex, Openclaw, Hermes, Runner...) - screenpipe/screenpipe
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
A Positively Charged JavaScript Runtime . Contribute to alshdavid-public/ion development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
We built RuleHunt to search for interesting cellular automata rules using tiktok-style engagement monitoring. The first rule shown is Conway’s Game of Life. As you scroll, you will see other random rules – the search space is 2^512. Help us find good rule heuristics by starring the ones you like! On mobile it's a tiktok-like scrolling interface; on desktop it's an interface for targeted rule searching. Starred rules go to a global leaderboard. GitHub repo: https://github.com/rulehunt/rulehunt
2025 · rulehunt.org · its alternatives →
- 24
- Discovering the most effective RAG pipeline for your specific data and use case can be daunting. It requires experimenting with various RAG modules and configurations, which are both time-consuming and complex. - AutoRAG addresses this challenge by automatically evaluating different combinations of RAG modules and their parameters. You don't need to write implementation code yourself; everything is set up through a single YAML file. - Our aim is to save you the hassle of continuously adapting to new RAG modules and configurations. Instead, you can focus on developing robust data for your…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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