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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Lreng – My small programming language written in C

This is my side project for the past few months. I started it because I just learned about functional programming and at the same time want to write something cool in C. Web playground: https://leonw774.github.io/lreng

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1MP

    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 →

  2. 2LC

    I made a simple virtual machine that runs C in the browser.This project is made as an experiment to see if C can be learned easier if the lower level is covered in paralel. Sandbox: https://vasyop.github.io/miniC-hosting Tutorial part 1: https://vasyop.github.io/miniC-hosting/?0 More info: https://github.com/vasyop/miniC-hosting/blob/master/README.md Please support this project: https://github.com/vasyop/miniC-hosting/blob/master/support.md

    2019 · its alternatives →

  3. 3IW

    The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…

    Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →

  4. 4GI

    Hi all! I'm going into my freshman year, and figured that the best way to prepare for the intro to programming Racket course would be to implement my own garbage-collected, dynamically typed, functional programming language in C ;) Anyways... here's the repo: https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb I started learning C over the summer, so I still have a whole lot to learn... Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! :D

    2023 · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    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 →

  6. 6

    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 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    I made this simple language over the past year, and it's time for me to say it's "done" (for now) and focus on other projects. I've struggled to answer the question "what is this language for?" other than "it's just for me" — and that's probably good enough. But I also wanted to make something "complete" that others could use if they wanted to. Writing my own language was an incredibly rewarding experience, and I'd recommend everyone trying it. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback, and please share your own experience if you've also made a language.

    2023 · cassette-lang.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    A minimal viable programming language on top of liblgpp - codr7/alang

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    This is an introduction to the "Nature" project: https://nature-lang.org/docs/getting-started/meet-nature I am the author of the Nature language, and today I have released the 0.4.0-beta version. For detailed updates, please see https://nature-lang.org/docs/prologue/release-notes Now, Nature can easily interact with C language. It is anticipated that in about six months, Nature will release a version available to the community. By then, there will be stable syntax API, a complete standard library, and support for development tools. Moreover,…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10IA

    Hi there. I'm working on a programming language -- called Ink - in my spare time, with a friend. It uses LLVM for the backend, the parser and lexer are both hand written in C. The project is just for a bit of fun, we aren't trying to "revolutionize the programming language", but we're okay with being a bit quirky and out of the box with some of the syntax/features in the language. At the moment, the language is in it's early stages, and there's still a lot to do, which means that if you want to learn more about compilers, now would be a good time to start working on the language, since…

    2015 · its alternatives →

  11. 11AA
  12. 12

    See what it’s like to program in a language without null.

    2015 · books.thoughtbot.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    This is my hobby C compiler project. Decided to publish the code today, as it finally compiled itself. The readme on the linked GitHub page has a bit of information on how it works. I wrote the thing for fun, but if anyone gets a better understanding of the dark corners of C because of it, I am happy.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14CO

    First tutorial to date. Writing your first C program, includes a link at the bottom with a detailed look at printf() as optional reading. I would love some feedback, as I intend writing up a lot of dev articles for people to learn from : www.xanthu.com/first-c-program

    2013 · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    General purpose, statically typed, functional programming language - BastianBlokland/novus

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    I rewrote the most common core string.h functions in pure C. I mostly did it to learn pointers and string. Would love to get any feedbacks:)

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Compiler Backend for LSTS (High-Level Typed Macro Assembler) - andrew4328/lambda-mountain

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Welp, second time posting this project! Bourne shell's ALGOL-inspired syntax seems a bit verbose, and while `rc` is quite nice, it lacks some features I'd prefer in a shell (this is probably by design). Though don't let the name I chose fool you, this shell is probably more related to `tcl` or `csh` than `rc`, except in some small places. It's been a while since my last post. Notable new features include a stack trace (via `caller`), `try`/`catch` (but only with user-supplied strings), `fc`, `disown`, login shell detection, and a shorter argv alias (`${argv number}` becomes `$number`).…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi HN! I kept hearing about Lisp and why it was special but didn't have a great place to start. I wanted something self-contained that helped me develop intuition rather than fluency. My hope is this is helpful for casual programmers, professionals from other fields who interact with code, or engineers who haven't had much exposure to interpreters or compilers. Hope this helps anyone else who's curious about getting a sense of Lisp and what makes it special with a limited time investment! Feedback or other cool Lisp things welcome :)

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Dmitri's blog about programming, Clojure, and software development

    Jul 2026 · yogthos.net · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    A minimal "@ moving around a hardcoded map" implemented in a bunch of languages, some by me and some contributed by others. A slightly more interesting riff on the Hello World or 99 Bottles of Beer theme. More languages or improvements on existing ones would be nice :) There's a github repo at: https://github.com/nrkn/SimpleRL

    2011 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hi HN, I'm the author. I built this project for two simple reasons: I've always used higher-level languages and wanted to finally understand what's happening "under the hood" of an interpreter. I also wanted a real project to force me to "power up" my C skills, especially with manual memory management and reference counting. The result is ToyForth, a minimal interpreter for a Forth-like language, written from scratch in C, stack-based. I focused on making the code clean and understandable. It's broken down into a few simple parts: A parser that turns source text into a list of objects…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23GA

    I started working on this back in 2019, mostly as a design idea. Over the last month I made a big push to make it 100% usable and replace C# in all my personal projects. I now feel it's solid enough to gather feedback from other developers. If you take it for a spin, I hope you enjoy it and send your thoughts!

    Jun 2026 · davidobando.github.io · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Keyword-free functional language with prototype objects.

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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