AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Ldump – serialize any Lua data
Some time ago, I was implementing saves for my LOVE2D game. I wanted to do a full dump of the game state -- which included closures (AI), complex graphs, sets with tables as keys and also fundamentally non-serializable data (coroutines and userdata), that require user-defined serialization/deserialization logic. I went through every Lua serialization library -- none covered all data types/cases. So I wrote my own. It is a polished version, thoroughly annotated, tested and documented. It is made to be as functional and customizable as possible (or at least I did everything I could…
Ldump is a Lua serialization library that converts any Lua data type to a storable format and back. It handles closures, complex table structures, tables as keys, and non-serializable data like coroutines and userdata… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1

A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes. - a327ex/SNKRX
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2

Been having a lot of fun reading an SC2Replay collection through nom parsers, serializing into Arrow files so that pola.rs can read them and perform data analysis with jupyter lab, plotly or interact with SQL operations, etc. Looking for feedback and ideas on what to progress on. For example, "through history, are my timings getting better?". etc. Also would love to have ideas on what libraries to use to perform forecasting.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3

Hey folks — here’s a small experiment I hacked together over the weekend: https://cleoselene.com/ In short, it’s a way to build multiplayer games with no client-side game logic. Everything is rendered on the server, and the game itself is written as simple Lua scripts. I built this to explore a few gamedev ideas I’ve been thinking about while working on Abstra: - Writing multiplayer games as if they were single-player (no client/server complexity) - Streaming game primitives instead of pixels, which should be much lighter - Server-side rendering makes cheating basically…
Jan 2026 · cleoselene.com · its alternatives →
- 4

A gameboy emulator written in pure Lua. Work in progress. - zeta0134/LuaGB
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5

Author here. I just wanted a quick and easy way to easily submit strings to a REST API and get back the embedding vectors in JSON using Llama2 and other similar LLMs, so I put this together over the past couple days. It's very quick and easy to set up and totally self-contained and self-hosted. You can easily add new models to it by simply adding the HuggingFace URL to the GGML format model weights. Two models are included by default, and these are automatically downloaded the first time it's run. It lets you not only submit text strings and get back the embeddings, but also to compare two…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6

I've been building a modern Ultima Online server emulator from scratch. It's not feature-complete (no combat, no skills yet), but the foundation is solid and I wanted to share it early. What it does today: - Full packet layer for the classic UO client (login, movement, items, mobiles) - Lua scripting for item behaviors (double-click a potion, open a door — all defined in Lua, no C# recompile) - Spatial world partitioned into sectors with delta sync (only sends packets for new sectors when crossing boundaries) - Snapshot-based persistence with MessagePack - Source generators for automatic DI…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7

LuaJIT FFI binding for libuv. Contribute to pguillory/luajit-libuv development by creating an account on GitHub.
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8

Fast and simple data serialization for C++. Contribute to apankrat/cpp-serializer development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9H0
Hello, Hacker News! My name is Lillian (see: http://about.lillian.link/), and I just released version 0.2 of my MIT-licensed game engine, Hypatia(http://lillian-lemmer.github.io/hypatia/). Hypatia is a game engine for single player 2D action adventure games. You can use it to make a game like Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. Hypatia is aimed at non-programmers and programmers alike. I'm seeking any sort of feedback. Hypatia supports FreeBSD first, but has great support for just about any platform…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 10

Over the last few years, I've needed an easy way to quickly serialise and deserialise various network protocols safely and efficiently. Most of the libraries that existed at the time were either quite heavy, had less than stellar performance, or were an abstraction level above what I was looking for. I decided to put together my own class to do the job, starting with an easy, low-overhead way to move bytes in and out of arbitrary buffers. Along the way, it picked up useful bits and pieces, such as buffer structures and allocators that made the byte shuffling faster, often being able to do it…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11

I'm excited to announce the first release of my library, evolved.lua! evolved.lua is a fast and flexible ECS (Entity-Component-System) library for Lua. It is designed to be simple and easy to use, while providing all the features needed to create complex systems with blazing performance. Enjoy!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Infinite▲74OS runtime unifying GA4, PostHog, + Stripe into a local db
Jun 2026 · infinite.fast · its alternatives →
- 13MP
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 →
- 14

Meta programming utilities for C++14. Merged in matt-42/lithium - matt-42/iod
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15

Python deserialization library for Unity3D Asset format - HearthSim/UnityPack
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16

The Emotion Engine has 32 MB of RAM total, so the trick is streaming weights from CD-ROM one matrix at a time during the forward pass — only activations, KV cache and embeddings live in RAM. This means models bigger than the RAM can still run, they just read more from disc. Had to build a custom quantized format (PSNT), hack endianness, write a tokenizer pipeline, and most of the PS2 SDK from scratch (releasing that separately). The model itself is also custom — a 10M param Llama-style architecture I trained specifically for this. And it works. On real hardware.
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17

EnterpriseDB (“EDB”), the leader in accelerating Postgres® in the enterprise, today announced its acquisition of Splitgraph, an early-stage disruptor that provides a Postgres compatible serverless SQL API for building data driven applications from hundreds of datasources. This move is seen as a mean
2020 · splitgraph.com · its alternatives →
- 18AR
My background project for the last two years has been re-implementing my 2004 C++ shoot'em up game in TypeScript + WebGL, and it's finally done (just in time for the 20th anniversary!) Play the game online: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/darklaga.html Technical article about the remake: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/remake.html I have tested Firefox, Chrome and Edge on desktop and mobile (no access to a device capable of running Safari). It's amazing how much difference 20 years makes: the hardware is so much more powerful, the web…
2024 · nicollet.net · its alternatives →
- 19

Hey HN! Roughly 4 years ago I started building a lazy functional iteration library for JS/TS. I had a few goals for the library: - Supporting sync, sequential async, and concurrent async iteration - Limiting it to a small number of orthogonal concepts that compose beautifully to solve problems - Making it fully tree-shakeable I built it for myself and have (mostly) been its only user as I refined it. I've used it in lots of personal projects and really enjoyed it. I recently decided it would be nice to spread that enjoyment so I created a documentation website complete with a playground…
2024 · lfi.dev · its alternatives →
- 20

Hey hacker news, We’re the cofounders at Psychic.dev (http://psychic.dev) where we help companies connect LLMs to private data. With the launch of Llama 2, we think it’s finally viable to self-host an internal application that’s on-par with ChatGPT, so we did exactly that and made it an open source project. We also included a vector DB and API server so you can upload files and connect Llama 2 to your own data. The RAG in RAGstack stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation, a technique where the capabilities of a large language model (LLM) are augmented by retrieving information…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21

I love making small 2D pixel art games, especially using tools that have some constraints. Things like Pico-8 and the Playdate SDK are simple, fun, and allow for focusing on the game idea rather than the technical minutia. Years ago I prototyped an idea for this little game engine, Usagi, but used Rhai instead of Lua. The idea for this little game engine never went away, so I decided to finally dig in and build it. Today I released v1.0.0 of Usagi Engine after making a bunch of small games, getting feedback from developers, and stabilizing the API. It's simple, has a great developer…
May 2026 · usagiengine.com · its alternatives →
- 22

laboratório de integração Lua com libuv para execução de scripts assíncronos e experimentação de POCs - joaoneto/lua-libuv
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23

Hey HN, I’m the author. I built Misata because existing tools (Faker, Mimesis) are great for random rows but terrible for relational or temporal integrity. I needed to generate data for a dashboard where "Timesheets" must happen after "Project Start Date," and I wanted to define these rules via natural language. How it works: LLM Layer: Uses Groq/Llama-3.3 to parse a "story" into a JSON schema constraint config. Simulation Layer: Uses Vectorized NumPy (no loops) to generate data. It builds a DAG of tables to ensure parent rows exist before child rows (referential integrity).…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24

Hi HN! This is an early proof of concept of a branchable, versioned OLTP + OLAP database that runs on a single, open copy of your data in object storage. If you are familiar with Databricks' LTAP (https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/d...) announcement from June, you can think of this as aspiring to be a fully open source, Apache 2.0 LTAP alternative with additional data versioning/auditability guarantees that enable audit, as_of queries, and (eventually) revert straight out of the box. How it works: 1. Writes land in vanilla postgres…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- Moongate – Ultima Online server emulator in .NET 10 with Lua scripting 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 →