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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Pixie is a toy 16-bit register VM

Minimal 16-bit toy VM and assembler. Contribute to vladris/pixie development by creating an account on GitHub.

Pixie is a 16-bit register virtual machine designed as a toy project. It simulates computer architecture concepts by emulating a simple processor with 16-bit registers. The project is intended for hobbyists, students… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Pixie is a toy 16-bit register VM launched in 2017; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1PI
  2. 2

    Using only a Raspberry Pi and an $11 video capture dongle, you can create your own KVM over IP device, allowing you to send keyboard input to a remote computer and capture its display.

    2020 · mtlynch.io · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    Pixie▲200

    Optimize Webflow CMS and e-commerce product images at scale

    2023 · trypixie.io · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Turing Pi is a compact ARM cluster that provides a secure and scalable compute in the edge. It is designed to make web-scale edge computing easier for developers.

    2020 · turingpi.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    "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 →

  6. 6

    Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…

    Aug 2026 · cactuscompute.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    Pixie▲62

    Instantly troubleshoot your applications on Kubernetes

    2020 · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    I made this game to teach my daughter how buffer overflows work. I want her to look at programs as things she can change, and make them do whatever she wants. Building your exploit in memory and jumping to it feels so cool. I hope this game teaches kids and programmers (who seem to have forgotten what computers actually are) that its quite fun to mess with programs. We used to have that excitement few years ago, just break into softice and change a branch into a nop and ignore the serial number check, or go to a different game level because this one is too annoying. While working on the game…

    2023 · punkx.org · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Build any brush you can imagine with nodes

    2025 · pixieditor.net · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    A Fully Homomorphic Encryption Brainfuck virtual machine - f-prime/arcanevm

    2019 · 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

    pi pod runs your pi session in a cloud pod. pipod.dev

    19d ago · pipod.dev · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Branchable computing by using a portable, lightweight, self-contained virtual machine - smol-machines/smolvm

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    A new Emacs mode for AI-assisted coding (Claude Code style), with native Emacs buffers instead of a flickering terminal. Built on top of pi, a no-bs open source Claude Code alternative. It supports Claude, GPT, Gemini, Ollama. I've been using it daily for weeks. Demo video that says more than $NUMBER words: https://danielnouri.org/media/pi-coding-agent-demo.mp4 The key decision here is that we have two separate windows: chat history is a markdown-mode buffer, with beautiful rendering, unlimted scrollback, selective tool expansion where it matters, etc. The input window…

    May 2026 · pi.dev · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    I wanted to see how fast an isolated code sandbox could start if I never had to boot a fresh VM. So instead of launching a new microVM per execution, I boot Firecracker once with Python and numpy already loaded, then snapshot the full VM state. Every execution after that creates a new KVM VM backed by a `MAP_PRIVATE` mapping of the snapshot memory, so Linux gives me copy-on-write pages automatically. That means each sandbox starts from an already-running Python process inside a real VM, runs the code, and exits. These are real KVM VMs, not containers: separate guest kernel, separate guest…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Build and run tiny vms from Dockerfiles. Small and sleek. - ottomatica/slim

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    Grass▲291

    Gives your coding agent a dedicated VM that's ready 24/7

    Apr 2026 · codeongrass.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18H1

    This is a 16bit CPU+Minicomputer from pure 74 series logic. It has user/kernel modes, virtual memory, prioritized IRQ's and DMA. It has a full C compiler and a unix-like OS. It's still in development.

    2023 · sol-1.org · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    The overall idea is to chart out the thousands of Mini PCs by benchmark and reveal the Pareto Front so you can get the most Compute per Dollar. Definitely a labor of love as I have a number of Mini PCs for my "homelab" (TrueNAS, piHole, Plex, basic stuff). It uses Gemini to extract specs from listings (since they're not often strongly categorized). Quick blog post here: https://luke.zip/posts/pareto-pcs/

    Jun 2026 · minipcs.zip · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    simple virtual machine and assembler. Contribute to ronsoros/rvm development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21VM

    2013 · blog.grunseid.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22
    PiBox▲75

    A modular Raspberry Pi storage server, supporting SATA SSDs

    2021 · kickstarter.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23
  24. 24

    hey guys. the other day i was migrating hosting providers and i just needed something not too heavy and convenient to spin up my backups for awhile and realised there is almost nothing out there. kimchi hasn't been updated for years and cockpit is heavy. so here's something i came up with in a couple hours because of a sudden urge, nothing fancy just basic creation with cloud init, lifecycle management and image/storage, but it's modern-ish and it compiles to a 8.4mb binary inclusive of the embedded web UI, CLI and API, and only dep is libvirt.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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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 →