Alternatives
Products that do what Hancho – A simple and pleasant build system in ~500 lines of Python does
Hi HN, I've been taking a break from my big side projects to work on a smaller side project - a tiny build system that's based on what I've learned from using Ninja and ad-hoc Python for my homebrew build systems over the last few years. It's basically a promise-based dependency graph runner plus a simple text templating engine, and it works quite well for the smallish projects I've tried it out on so far. If you find Make crufty, CMake inconsistent, Ninja verbose, and Bazel just too much build system, give Hancho a try. Don't like one of Hancho's defaults? It's only 500 lines - hack it up…
- 1IB
I love C and C++, but setting up projects can sometimes be a pain. Every time I wanted to start something new I'd spend the first hour writing CMakeLists.txt, figuring out find_package, copying boilerplate from my last project, and googling why my library isn't linking. By the time the project was actually set up I'd lost all momentum. So, I built Craft - a lightweight build and workflow tool for C and C++. Instead of writing CMake, your project configuration goes in a simple craft.toml: [project] name = "my_app" version = "0.1.0" language = "c" c_standard = 99 [build] type = "executable"…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 2AT
2017 · github.com
- 3SA
Hi HN! Silk is a project I began working on approximately six months ago without any prior experience or knowledge of compiler design, and it's been a frustrating but fun learning experience. It is very much a work in progress, but I would love to hear feedback of any kind!
2020 · ajaymt.github.io
- 4PA
I’ve been working on Pyra for the past few months and wanted to start sharing it in public. Right now it’s focused on the core package/project management workflow: Python installs, init, add/remove, lockfiles, env sync, and running commands in the managed env. The bigger thing I’m exploring is whether Python could eventually support a more cohesive toolchain story overall, more in the direction of Bun: not just packaging, but maybe over time testing, tasks, notebooks, and other common workflow tools feeling like one system instead of a bunch of separate pieces. It’s still early,…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 5OD
May 2026 · github.com
- 6MA
Hi HN, I'm the creator of Mach (https://github.com/octalide/mach or https://machlang.org). Two days ago, we finally achieved full self hosting. I wanted to make a post here to show off the language since this is a big milestone for us. ## TL;DR about the language for those curious: - There are no external dependencies anywhere in the pipeline. This includes LLVM, libc bindings, or anything of the sort (save for the historical bootstrap compiler, which requires any C compiler and has been phased out completely). - Mach is extremely opinionated and very…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 7RA
I wanted to have a framework that would let me build web apps faster than ever before. I didn’t care if it was a little hacky or didn’t use best practices — I wanted to be able to get a multi-user application out the door in hours instead of months. I researched the CMS space for months before deciding to build something from scratch. My goal was to be 90% done building a web app once I had the static HTML and CSS finished. I’m not a big fan of building out API endpoints over and over again for every new app, fiddling with a database, or doing lots of config. What I ended up with was a…
2020
- 8MW
This is a little project I've been working on for a while in order to better learn Python. Although IRC may not exactly be the most exciting medium, I still find it to be fun and useful, this interest lead me to writing a bot. In doing this I realized that what would actually be more interesting would be if I had a framework. There may already be such a thing, certainly there are IRC libraries, but I don't know if they're well-suited to deploying bots. At any rate if for no other reason than the fact that I am relatively new to programming and eager to learn I decided to build a framework.…
2011
- 95D
597 days ago, I posted about the project our team was developing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183322 - here on HN, and today we're finally taking the wraps off what we've been working on since then. At it's core, what we've been building is an end-to-end solution for creating, storing, and working with structured content in a way that's accessible to anyone. You can check out an introduction - http://team.marquee.by/introducing-marquee/ and dig into the technical/philosophical details of our approach -…
2013
- 10IW
Background: I've been working on a book to help developers learn and write idiomatic Python. It's taken far longer than I imagined, but today I made it available for purchase (http://www.jeffknupp.com/writing-idiomatic-python-ebook). The automated build and test system I'm using is ridiculous. It uses: virtualenv, tox, pytest, coverage, doctest, pandoc, make, xelatex, makeindex, and a ~200 line Python script to collect and format the output. The details of the build/test system I created are described in detail here:…
2013
- 11DP
Hi HN – this is Peter from DBOS here with Qian (qianli_cs) and Jeremy (jedberg). We’re building an open-source, lightweight durable workflows library on top of Postgres. Ever since we first launched on HN last year, we’ve been blown away by the support, feedback, and response we’ve received from the community. We've realized durable workflows are critical for everything from business processes to AI automation to data pipelines, but most existing durable orchestration tools are either too heavy or too complicated for most applications. Instead, we're building something lightweight, simple,…
2025 · github.com
- 12UA
Hey HN! After using a combination of Unsloth and Axolotl a lot, and finding it generally painful to figure out the right performance tuning for things like batch sizing and multi-GPU sharding, I wrote a small Python lib that sets up known-good LoRA training configurations for Llama 3.1 8B and 70B Instruct, and includes helpers for distilling from larger models or training on serverless finetuning platforms, and includes a walkthrough for distilling DeepSeek-R1 into a Llama 3.1 8B LoRA... But you can use it for pretty much any finetuning task, not just distilling large models!
2025 · github.com
- 13ZD
I have written a from-scratch minimalist Java web framework, called Minum. I'd like to get your thoughts. The driving goal has been achieving characterics of plainness, frugality, performance, maintainability, testability, and ease of use. It has zero dependencies other than Java's SDK, yet provides a web server, routing, authentication, testing, logging, templating, HTML parsing, and a database, in 3800 lines of code, compiling to a 150k binary. It currently supports a web application in production. There are also example projects demonstrating its use, linked in the documentation. As the…
2023 · github.com
- 14AT
Hello HN! I've been building this side project which is a task manager as simple and as powerful as I've been able to built it. It's specially thought for the tasks that you must complete at work, and you want to remember but you want to avoid all the bureaucracy of some TO-DO apps like JIRA. It's been quite a journey to build it. Its backend lives in Amazon Lightsail, and for now it's a Django app with a SQLite database. I'm quite surprised on how good SQLite has been performing on all the tests so far. The frontend it's a React app. Everything is pretty standard, but those are technologies…
2024 · wiseowl.cat
- 15LD
Hi HN! This is Qian here with Peter (KraftyOne) and Jeremy (jedberg). We’re building DBOS, an open-source, lightweight durable workflows library that you can add to Python apps in just a few lines of code. It’s comparable to popular open-source workflow and queue libraries like Airflow and Celery, but more lightweight with a greater focus on reliability and automatically recovering from failures. Our goal in building DBOS is to make workflows lightweight and flexible so you can add them to your existing apps with minimal work. Everything you need to run durable workflows and queues is…
2025 · github.com
- 16HA
Hi HN! My name is Marko and I am working on a CI/CD system at harmont.dev, a CI/CD system that sucks slightly less. As I've been working on the cloud, I realized that the CLI might be generally useful as a task runner, even if you don't care for our CI/CD, and that's what I'm sharing here! Every CI system I've used at Tesla, Bun, and mesa.dev has had the same problems: stateless and slow (GHA), or stateful and horizontally unscalable (Jenkins), with YAML on top of either. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was the realization that all my Claudes are waiting upwards…
May 2026 · github.com
- 17TA
Tuki is a small, open-source utility that lets you run one-off commands in production through Git, bringing version control and code review to production scripts. I built it after accidentally dropping a production table due to a console typo Key features: - Run scripts through Git PRs instead of direct console access - Built-in auditing via Git history - RBAC through standard Git permissions - Simple setup for non-Kubernetes environments - MIT licensed Demo & more details: https://github.com/hundredwatt/tuki Announcement blog post:…
2024 · github.com
- 18RA
Hi, I've made a Dis virtual machine and Limbo programming language compiler (called RiceVM) in Rust. It can run Dis bytecode (for example, Inferno OS applications), compile Limbo programs, and includes a fairly complete runtime with garbage collection, concurrency features, and many of the standard modules from Inferno OS's original implementation. The project is still in an early stage, but if you're interested in learning more about RiceVM or trying it out, you can check out the links below: Project's GitHub repo: https://github.com/habedi/ricevm RiceVM documentation:…
Apr 2026
- 19TA
Hi HN, I'm Matt, CTO at STUDIO HAZE in Seoul. I've wanted to build a programming language for twenty years, ever since Ruby got me wondering what a small language out of Korea might look like. Today I'm opening the repo for the first time, as Topaz v5.2. Topaz reads like Python or TypeScript, runs on a reference interpreter (topaz run), and builds a self-contained native binary by lowering to Rust, then handing off to the Rust toolchain (topaz build). function factorial(n: int) -> int { if n string { return "안녕하세요, {이름}님!" } print(인사하기("토파즈")) // 안녕하세요, 토파즈님! sql, sh, and path…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 20BA
Hi all, I've been working on a new programming language called Blade for a couple of months now and think it's time I introduced it to people and get reactions and feedbacks. Plus, I need people to test it and find the bugs in it. The repository is at https://github.com/blade-lang/blade and the documentation is in progress and going great at bladelang.com and even though I wanted to wait to write everything before I do this before, I think it's best to get started with letting people know about it now. There are lots of tests in the repository and experienced developers…
2021
- 21OL
Hello Hacker News, I often hear people saying "all build-systems suck", an opinion I have been sharing for years, and this is the motivation for this project. I finally got the opportunity to make it open-source, and here it is. In a few words, it is like make, except it can be comfortably used even in big projects using HPC (with millions of jobs, thousands of them running in parallel). The major differences are that: - dependencies are automatically tracked (no need to call gcc -M and the like, no need to be tailored to any specific tool, it just works) by spying disk activity - it is…
2025 · github.com
- 22AA
Hey HN! I really like local apps for their simplicity and privacy and hate paying Saas bills and I wanted a way to start automating my life with AI so I started building Anything. Anything is built on Tauri so the front end is React and the "backend" is Rust. It's 100% local & 100% doesn't ask you to spin up docker to use. Another core goal of the app is to get away from "package bloat" you see in other general purpose AI oss projects where they have a package.json that is 300 lines long ( more on that later. ) Oh btw I suck at Rust! I learned Rust while building this so the code is _not…
2024 · github.com
- 23L0
What's your tool chain for data and document processing? - jq is great, but limited to JSON; and jQuery limited to HTML; templating systems get messy for non-trivial logic; TypeScript lacks pattern matching and schema support. So I built Lambda — an expressive functional language that combines the power of Lisp, TypeScript, and many DSLs like jq, jQuery, RelaxNG, etc. It has a lightweight 9 MB runtime, built from scratch in C/C++, that provides an end-to-end document processing pipeline (parse → validate/query/transform → layout → render/view). Internally, Lambda parse…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 24PR
Hi HN, While building RAG agents, I noticed a lot of token budget was wasted on formatting overhead (HTML tags, JSON structure, whitespace). Existing solutions felt too heavy (often requiring torch/transformers), so I wrote this lightweight, zero-dependency library to solve it. It includes strategies for context packing, PII redaction, and tool output compression. Benchmarks show it can save ~15% of tokens with negligible latency overhead (<0.5ms). Happy to answer any questions!
Dec 2025 · github.com
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