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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Nibble

An attempt at a single pass LLVM frontend in ~3000 lines of C without external dependencies, malloc, or an AST. Included are some graphical examples. The IR isn't perfect, and the README touches on one particular downfall

Nibble is a compact LLVM frontend written in approximately 3000 lines of C that operates in a single pass without external dependencies, memory allocation, or an abstract syntax tree. Designed for developers interested… 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

    A complete compiler for a simple language (in less than 150 LoC) - 00_readme.md

    2022 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    The core question: how did HP's scientific calculators actually work at the gate level? That rabbit hole led to building one from scratch. The architectural decision everything else follows from: a decimal calculator should store numbers as BCD — one decimal digit per 4-bit nibble. A standard byte-oriented CPU (Z80, 6502) fights that layout constantly. So I designed a small custom CPU in Verilog where 4 bits is the natural data width and memory is nibble addressable. What the project covers: - Custom CPU: Harvard architecture, 12-bit ISA, 8-state execution FSM, hardware stack guard with a…

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3GI

    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 →

  4. 4

    "interesting" VM in C. Let's see how this goes. Contribute to tekknolagi/carp development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2014 · github.com · 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

    Heap based scheme machine. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

    2025 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Build your own high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA - a smaller version of vLLM - jmaczan/tiny-vllm

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    A fun toy memory allocator (not thread safe, that's a future TODO). I also wanted to explain how I approached it, so I also wrote a tutorial blog post (~20 minute read) covering the code which you can find the link to in the README.

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    The Nim programming language is a concise, fast programming language that compiles to C, C++ and JavaScript.

    2016 · nim-lang.org · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    An experimental Python-to-C transpiler and domain specific language for embedded high-performance computing - zanellia/prometeo

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Minimalist, dependency-free virtual machine sandbox for microcontrollers and other resource-constrained devices. Single C file, no dynamic memory allocations, asynchronous design, pure C99 - ringtailsoftware/uvm32

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi! I've been working on the flipjump project, a programming language with 1 opcode: flip (invert) a bit, then jump (unconditionally). So a bit-flip followed by more bit-flips. It's effectively a bunch of NOT gates. This language, as poor as it sounds, is RICH. Today I completed my compiler from C to FlipJump. It takes C files, and compiles them into flipjump. I finished testing it all today, and it works! My key interest in this project is to stretch what we know of computing and to prove that anything can be done even with minimal power. I appreciate you reading my announcement, and be…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    A minimal stack-based VM. Contribute to codr7/liblg development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    My implementation of Thorsten Bell's book (Writing an Interpreter in Go) - actuallyachraf/monkey-giggle

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    A fast, rootless sandbox and virtual resource runtime for any workload, including untrusted and AI-generated code. Daemonless: a real, kernel-enforced container in ~3.5 ms from an OCI image, out of one static binary - getkern/kern

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16IB

    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 →

  17. 17

    I've created cppmatch, a lightweight, header-only C++ library that brings Rust-inspired pattern matching and error handling to C++. It tries to imitate the functionality of the questionmark (?) operator in C++ by using a macro that uses the gcc extension https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Statement-Exprs.html This allows to create exceptionless code with non-intrusive error-as-value that unlike Exceptions, makes it clear which kinds of error a function can generate and forces you to handle (or ignore) them. The ? operator translates to *expect* To handle the errors I…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Token-efficiency linter for LLM prompts and payloads - ritenv/tokensift

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hey everyone! I just launched Essentials-C, a minimal C library with handy functions for string and array manipulation – built from scratch with simplicity and learning in mind. Highlights: - `length`, `reverse`, `substring`, `trim`, `replaceChar`, etc. - `bubbleSort`, `includes`, `startsWith`, `endsWith`, and more - Pure C, no external dependencies - Clean, readable code – great for beginners and power users I’m building it to be the “Essentials” of every C project — feel free to contribute or suggest features! GitHub: https://github.com/oileo/Essentials-C Feedback is…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    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 →

  21. 21

    The Problem "Vibing" with LLMs is often too shallow for complex logic, while writing full specifications is cognitively expensive and slow. We need a middle ground that mimics how human programmers gather context—scanning structure before diving into details. The Solution: Outline Driven Development (ODD) I've built a "batteries-included" kit for Gemini/Claude/Codex that uses AST analysis to understand code structure rather than just raw text. This relies on a hyper-optimized Rust toolchain (`ast-grep`, `ripgrep`, `jj`, etc.) to feed precise, structural context to the agent. 1. The…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    This repo is the result of a debate about what kind of programming language might be appropriate if humans are no longer the primary authors. Initially the thought was "LLMs can just generate binaries directly" (this was before a more famous person had the same idea). But that on reflection seems like a bad approach because languages exist to capture program semantics that are elided by translation to machine code. The next step was to wonder if an existing "machine readable" program representation can be the target for LLM code generation. It turns out yes. This project is the result of…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I've been using LLMs for long discovery and research chats (papers, repos, best practices), then distilling that into phased markdown (build plan + tests), then handing those phases to Codex/Claude to implement and test phase by phase. The annoying part was always the distillation and keeping docs and architecture current, so I built Unpack: a lightweight GitHub template plus docs structure and a few commands that turns conversations into phases/specs and keeps project docs up to date as the agent builds. It can also generate Mintlify-friendly end-user docs. There are other…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Minimal, readable LLM post-training experiments on one 8GB GPU. Measures forgetting, seed variance, and RL emergence. - pochenai/nano-llm-posttraining

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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