Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Heman – Tiny C library for working with height maps
Heman is a C library that provides image utilities for working with height maps and other floating-point images. It is designed for developers who need to process and manipulate height map data programmatically. The… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Heman – Tiny C library for working with height maps launched in 2015; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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Thinc is a lightweight type-checked deep learning library for composing models, with support for layers defined in frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow.
2020 · thinc.ai · its alternatives →
- 2IT
2018 · wykobi.com · its alternatives →
- 3

Long-simmering side project that is finally ready to see the light. HAMTs are a cool persistent data structure and implementing one has been a lot of fun. Beyond the code, there is likely some value in the extensive and largely complete implementation docs; basic benchmarks are linked in the README, too. Kind of aiming to be "the libavl for HAMTs". That is obviously a high and aspirational bar but a distinct possibility if it stirs up a little interest and/or contribution. Anyways, it's time for this to go out, collect feedback and maybe even some use outside of toy projects. Let me…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4

Geometry library for C - Fast point-in-polygon. Contribute to tidwall/tg development by creating an account on GitHub.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5HA
Hsdlib is a small C library for fast vector distance and similarity calculations. At the moment, it supports: - Euclidean, Manhattan, and Hamming distances - Dot product, cosine, and Jaccard similarities Hsdlib uses SIMD acceleration (AVX, AVX2, AVX512, NEON, and SVE instructions) to speed things up. GitHub link: https://github.com/habedi/hsdlib
2025 · its alternatives →
- 6

Single-file C library for triangulating wide lines, curves, and streamlines.
2019 · prideout.net · its alternatives →
- 7

A small, portable, linear probing hash map. Contribute to e-dant/salmagundi development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8

I ported Microsoft's TRELLIS.2 (4B parameter image-to-3D model) to run on Apple Silicon via PyTorch MPS. The original requires CUDA with flash_attn, nvdiffrast, and custom sparse convolution kernels: none of which work on Mac. I replaced the CUDA-specific ops with pure-PyTorch alternatives: a gather-scatter sparse 3D convolution, SDPA attention for sparse transformers, and a Python-based mesh extraction replacing CUDA hashmap operations. Total changes are a few hundred lines across 9 files. Generates ~400K vertex meshes from single photos in about 3.5 minutes on M4 Pro (24GB). Not as fast as…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Image processing algorithms in pure Go. Contribute to anthonynsimon/bild development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10N5
2020 · nn-512.com · its alternatives →
- 11

Little Ball of Fur - A graph sampling extension library for NetworKit and NetworkX (CIKM 2020) - benedekrozemberczki/littleballoffur
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12

A modular web framework for C, inspired by kernel modules. Dynamically upload and compile C code at runtime to build REST APIs, WebSocket services, and more. Includes support for JSON (Jansson), SQLite, OpenSSL, and streaming large data efficiently. - joexbayer/c-web-modules
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13

Just wanted to share with HN a simple/minimal open source Python library that generates SVG files visualizing two dimensional data and distributions, in case others find it useful or interesting. I wrote it as a fun project, mostly because I found that the standard libraries in Python generated unnecessarily large SVG files. One nice property is that I can configure the visuals through CSS, which allows me to support dark/light mode browser settings. The graphs are specified as JSON files (the repository includes a few examples). It supports scatterplots, line plots, histograms,…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14

Two weeks ago I was on my babymoon in Corfu, Greece. While in transit, I was overseeing a GSoC intern submit an important feature to my array database library, Xarray-SQL. He added `to_dataset()`, which completed the roundtrip between thinking of array data in a tabular model simultaneously as gridded rasters (the premise of the project is that every Nd array can be mapped to 2d, where orthogonal dims of the Nd array are just primary keys of a tabular representation). We discussed in chat, now that this feature existed, what demos could we make that would prove this data model works? With…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15

This project presents a new data structure for storing ordered integer maps. The proposed data structure is a compressive, cache-friendly, radix tree that has performance comparable to an unordered map (`std::unordered_map`) and is an order of magnitude faster than an ordered map (`std::map`).
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16

I've written Mojibake because I don't like the other Unicode libraries for Unicode support. It consists of only two amalgamation files: mojibake.h and mojibake.c. I've added all the most important Unicode algorithms, such as normalization, case conversion, segmentation, bidirectional text, collation, confusable, and others. I regularly test it in these OSes: Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Windows 11. You can find a WASM demo on that site of all the public API functions and the documentation. If you want to participate, feel free to do it. Any kind of help is welcome. Check the…
Jul 2026 · mojibake.zaerl.com · its alternatives →
- 17IB
This weekend I created stacklib.h - a single-header library that brings Forth-style stack operations to C. It implements a basic interpreter with: - Stack operations (push/pop/dup/swap/over/drop) - Arithmetic (+, -, *, /) - Output (., emit, cr) - Stack inspection (.s, depth) Example usage: Stack s; stack_init(&s); dict_init(); exec(&s, "10 20 + ."); // Prints "30" exec(&s, "1 2 3 4 .s"); // Shows stack contents The library is self-contained, requires no dependencies, and handles basic error checking. It was inspired by wanting to understand…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 18

minimal DL library in C: 24 NAIVE cuda/cpu ops, autodiff engine, python API (ops bindings/layers/models), tensor abstraction, strides, complex indexing (multi-dim slices like numpy), computation-graph visualizer, saving/loading params, primitive garbage collection, autogenerated tests, optimizers, w
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19

Fast by default, flexible 2D plotting library. Contribute to wwwtyro/candygraph development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20

Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows). - webview/webview
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21

I built a browser-based port of fogleman/primitive — a Go CLI tool that approximates images using primitive shapes (triangles, ellipses, beziers, etc.) via a hill-climbing algorithm. The original tool requires building from source and running from the terminal, which isn't exactly accessible. I compiled the core logic to WebAssembly so anyone can drop an image and watch it get reconstructed shape by shape, entirely client-side with no server involved. Demo: https://primitive-playground.taiseiue.jp/ Source:…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22

I deal with a lot of geometry stuff at work with computer vision and photogrammetry, which usually comes from the real world. It's seldom clean and neat, and I'm often trying to find a way to "make it nice" or "make it pretty". I've always struggled with what that really means formally. That led me to shape regularization (a technique used in computational geometry to clean up geometric data). CGAL had implemented a few methods for that, but there are more ways to do it, which I thought were nice. Also I typically work in Python, so it was nice to have a pure Python library could handle…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23

A re-implementation of Karpathy's micrograd in C. Contribute to oraziorillo/microcrad development by creating an account on GitHub.
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24

fundamental tools in the spirit of C. Contribute to codr7/libcodr7 development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- TG – Fast geometry library for C alternatives
- Hsdlib – A C Library for Vector Similarity with SIMD Acceleration alternatives
- Tiny C library for tessellating lines and curves 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 →