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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Lunar, a "fast", memory-efficient Lua 5.1 VM written in Go

I'm releasing Lunar, a new Lua 5.1 compiler and virtual machine written entirely in Go. It includes the standard libraries, coroutines as well as supporting Lua 5.2-style goto. The embedding API avoids the Lua C API’s stack-based interface in favor of typed Go values and callback frames. Libraries and script-file access are opt-in, so the host explicitly controls what Lua code can access. On my current benchmarks and use-cases, Lunar is often ~1.5x to 2x faster than GopherLua and Shopify’s go-lua. Its largest improvement however is memory use: loading a 9 MB CBOR-derived object graph…

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

  1. 1

    🌙 The minimal & fast library for functional user interfaces - kbrsh/moon

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    LunaRoute▲106

    LunaRoute is a high-performance local proxy for AI coding assistants like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI, and OpenCode. Get complete visibility into every LLM interaction with zero-overhead passthrough, comprehensive session recording, and powerful debugging capabilities. - See Everything Your AI Does - get full logs (JSONL), summary of sessions including tokens used (input/output) as well as tools usage and success rates. - Privacy & Compliance Built-In - redact or tokenize any sensitive information (regex based). - Speaks OpenAI and Anthropic dialects so you can route (and translate)…

    Oct 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    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 →

  4. 4

    The purely functional user interface library that

    2018 · kbrsh.github.io · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    Lua▲194

    No-code token minter for Polygon

    2021 · lua.cash · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hi HN! I'm just sharing a project I've been working on during the LLM Efficiency Challenge - you can now finetune Llama with QLoRA 5x faster than Huggingface's original implementation on your own local GPU. Some highlights: 1. Manual autograd engine - hand derived backprop steps. 2. QLoRA / LoRA 80% faster, 50% less memory. 3. All kernels written in OpenAI's Triton language. 4. 0% loss in accuracy - no approximation methods - all exact. 5. No change of hardware necessary. Supports NVIDIA GPUs since 2018+. CUDA 7.5+. 6. Flash Attention support via Xformers. 7. Supports 4bit and 16bit…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Maybe you should use https://github.com/fiatjaf/flua instead of this - fiatjaf/glua

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Let-go is a Clojure-like language (~90% compatible with JVM Clojure) written in pure Go. It ships as a ~10MB static binary and cold boots in ~7ms - that's about 50x faster than JVM and 3x faster than Babashka. It has decent throughput on algorithmic workloads - within ballpark of the GraalVM-backed sci. I started this project in 2021 as an elaborate practical joke: I wanted to have an excuse for writing Clojure while pretending to write Go. Jokes aside, it turned out to be pretty decent: it feels like real Clojure, it has an nREPL server (supported in Calva, CIDER, etc.), it's easily…

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    An IDE layer for Neovim with sane defaults. Completely free and community driven.

    2021 · lunarvim.org · its alternatives →

  10. 10AT

    Hello, I'm building a WebAssembly compiler and documenting the process in the meantime. This aims to be a tool for demonstration and education purpose. It doesn't aim to do fancy stuff nor to replace existing ones. I'm building this to learn and to improve and hopefully it can be useful for others as well :) From last time I've presented the idea, I've implemented more basic features on Luna and I've built a custom and tiny runtime for Luna! (documenting it of course). Any feedback is really appreciated :) Repo: https://github.com/thomscoder/luna

    2022 · luna-demo.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hi HN! We're Gabriel & Viraj, and we're excited to open source TensorZero. To be a little cheeky, TensorZero is an open-source platform that helps LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products. 1. Integrate our model gateway 2. Send metrics or feedback 3. Unlock compounding improvements in quality, cost, and latency It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying: • Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead • Observability: inference & feedback → your database • Optimization: better prompts, models, inference strategies • Experimentation:…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi HN, I’m Joe. My friends Matthew, Jake and I are building Luminal (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;luminalai.com&#x2F;), a GPU compiler for automatically generating fast GPU kernels for AI models. It uses search-based compilation to achieve high performance. We take high level model code, like you'd have in PyTorch, and generate very fast GPU code. We do that without using LLMs or AI - rather, we pose it as a search problem. Our compiler builds a search space, generates millions of possible kernels, and then searches through it to minimize runtime. You can try out a demo in `demos&#x2F;matmul` on mac to…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hi all! Sharing a small pet project my agents and I have been working on: Lunar, a coding harness configurable and extensible via Lua scripts. I'm already using Lunar to develop Lunar :) Give it a try! Soon you will be able to extend it using Lua hooks.

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    This started as a hard requirement for my TUI-based editor application, it ended up going in a few different directions. A suite of tools that help with semantic code entities: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;odvcencio&#x2F;gts-suite A next-gen version control system called Got: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;odvcencio&#x2F;got I think this has some pretty big potential! I think there's many classes of application (particularly legacy architecture) that can benefit from these kinds of analysis tooling. My next post will be about composing all these together, an exciting project I call…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15MA
  16. 16
    Moon▲15

    A minimal, blazing fast user interface library.

    2017 · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Fast JSON encoder/decoder compatible with encoding/json for Go - goccy/go-json

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    blogging klipse Lua Wasm live examples code snippets

    2017 · blog.klipse.tech · its alternatives →

  19. 19
    moon▲99

    A multi-language monorepo tool

    2023 · moonrepo.dev · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Go compiler for small places. Microcontrollers, WebAssembly (WASM/WASI), and command-line tools. Based on LLVM. - tinygo-org/tinygo

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    A collection of impls to get the current moon phase - iriswebb/moonphase

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22LA
  23. 23AT

    I recently built a small open-source tool to benchmark different LLM API endpoints — including OpenAI, Claude, and self-hosted models (like llama.cpp). It runs a configurable number of test requests and reports two key metrics: • First-token latency (ms): How long it takes for the first token to appear • Output speed (tokens&#x2F;sec): Overall output fluency Demo: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llmapitest.com&#x2F; Code: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;qjr87&#x2F;llm-api-test The goal is to provide a simple, visual, and reproducible way to evaluate performance across different LLM providers, including…

    2025 · llmapitest.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    laboratório de integração Lua com libuv para execução de scripts assíncronos e experimentação de POCs - joaoneto/lua-libuv

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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