Alternatives
Products that do what Rig, the Zero Magic, Zero Dependency Build System does
Announcement: https://yzena.com/2024/04/rig-24.04.00-has-been-released/ Okay, it's not zero dependency, but it does only need a C99 compiler and some way to run a command. (C11 preferred, though.) Anyway, after more than three years of work, Rig is finally ready because it can build itself on non-Windows platforms. (Windows support only needs to figure out how to access the compiler.) Rig's website: https://rigbuild.dev/ That website has the docs as well, but for anyone who can contact me [1], feel free to do so if the docs are not sufficient for…
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Hi HN! I've posted this a few weeks back without much HN traction - today we've added a free community tier, so anyone can try it out. TL;DR: We’ve launched StableBuild, a new tool to easily freeze and pin Docker images, operating system packages, Python packages, and arbitrary build dependencies; in 5 lines of code: https://stablebuild.com . As the CTO at an ML startup w/ 75 people (https://edgeimpulse.com/) I’ve grown incredibly frustrated with non-deterministic builds. Last year basically every week one of our containers (we have 40+ unique ones in prod)…
2024 · stablebuild.com
- 8FG
Built this as a guide for users of my hosting service. Everything here was run on a real instance. The Mesa/LLVM dependency is genuinely painful on a 1GB disk, and I couldn't find a way around it. WindowMaker won the window manager battle purely on dependency chain cleanliness; it pulls in no GTK, no Python, no audio stack. Happy to answer questions about any of the choices made. Screenshots at the end.
Mar 2026 · tierhive.com
- 9SH
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
- 10FB
Last week I released a web-based, automated build environment / Makefile generator for FPGA projects: http://www.boldport.com It's just a start, and I'd appreciate feedback. Tell me what sucks about it, what you love, where to improve. (BTW, I'm happy to help anyone who's interested to set up or convert their projects to work with the "boldport flow"!) In this context, my proposal for a scalable and version control friendly project structure for FPGA designs may be interesting as well: https://www.boldport.com/docs/fpgaproj
2011
- 11ZD
I have written a from-scratch minimalist Java web framework, called Minum. I'd like to get your thoughts. The driving goal has been achieving characterics of plainness, frugality, performance, maintainability, testability, and ease of use. It has zero dependencies other than Java's SDK, yet provides a web server, routing, authentication, testing, logging, templating, HTML parsing, and a database, in 3800 lines of code, compiling to a 150k binary. It currently supports a web application in production. There are also example projects demonstrating its use, linked in the documentation. As the…
2023 · github.com
- 12IM
This is a personal project I've been working on and off for the past few years. It's a set of tools that have allowed me to prototype quickly small (and increasingly bigger) kernels, and create userspace programs to interact with them. Supports riscv64, amd64 and i386. The intel port has been tested and used on real hardware, from big dual-socket Xeon machines to an old X220. It is all C, I have plan to make rust bindings for the kernel library. But again, they're plans at this stage. Porting to new architectures is relatively simple, a basic port to riscv took me a couple of weeks of…
2024 · github.com
- 13CA
CJIT started as a hobby project around Fabrice Bellard’s tinyCC and slowly grew into something much more practical. It is now a small portable C compiler and runner that works across Linux, macOS, and Windows, can self host, and is packaged as a single executable. What mattered most to me was keeping the barrier to entry low. You can take one small binary, drop it onto a system, and compile or run C code using the libraries already available there, without setting up a full toolchain or installing a large stack of dependencies. I find that useful for quick prototyping, testing, auditing,…
Apr 2026 · dyne.org
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Hi HN, I’ve been working on an experimental programming language called XXML. The project started from a frustration I kept running into across systems languages: Languages with strong ownership tend to avoid runtime reflection. Languages with rich reflection usually rely on GC or give up memory guarantees. Compile-time code generation often requires a separate macro language. I wanted to explore whether those tradeoffs are truly necessary. What XXML is trying to do XXML is a statically-typed, native language that: Uses explicit ownership and borrowing (no garbage collector) Supports runtime…
Dec 2025 · xxml-language.com
- 15SH
Three months ago I shared OpenPanel with you all. Got so many encouraging comments then but one feature that was missing/undocumented was self-hosting. I just released it today and thought I would share it here. Keep hosting! Old post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40432213
2024 · docs.openpanel.dev
- 16RA
Hi, I've made a Dis virtual machine and Limbo programming language compiler (called RiceVM) in Rust. It can run Dis bytecode (for example, Inferno OS applications), compile Limbo programs, and includes a fairly complete runtime with garbage collection, concurrency features, and many of the standard modules from Inferno OS's original implementation. The project is still in an early stage, but if you're interested in learning more about RiceVM or trying it out, you can check out the links below: Project's GitHub repo: https://github.com/habedi/ricevm RiceVM documentation:…
Apr 2026
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Hi everybody, this was my project to learn Zig and RISC-V+x86_64 assembly. Not sure if anybody is actually interested in yet another Brainfuck compiler, so I'll just write up some random things I learned while building it! - A primitive assembly stitching compiler is 10x faster than the interpreter. Did not expect that. - The generated x86 code is really bad (e.g. it always uses 6 or 7 byte sized instructions with 32-bit immediates when there are much smaller ones) but it doesn't really matter. Good code generated by GCC and clang for transpiled Brainfuck->C is not much faster as it's…
2025 · github.com
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I am very new to this. I have tried to follow to follow your guidelines, but I'm not sure if I have got it right. The URL point to release notes which give a brief overview of the project including its history. As production code, this is still early stage - but I think it works well enough to be useful to people other than myself.
2023 · github.com
- 19FS
## tldr You can deploy javascript apps on Cyclic after logging in with GH. Quick starts: ## Description At my last job I saw new developers struggle to get experiments and POCs from their local to live in the cloud. As we continue to expand the software development profession, more developers will need this same help. So we built cyclic.sh. Our aim is to empower even the most junior developer with robust infrastructure and deployments that just work. We can build and deploy your code in less time than it took to read this paragraph. ## What works now - Zero-config build, deploy and hosting…
2022 · app.cyclic.sh
- 20VI
This was submitted before but it didn't seem to get much attention because I don't think the title was very descriptive and the submitter was brand new. I almost didn't click it but once I did I thought the project was pretty awesome and had a lot of promise. Hope this doesn't violate the rules, I have no horse in the game, but the creator is here on the site so hopefully he'll be able to answer your questions.
2022 · docs.vaxiin.io
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Feb 2026 · github.com
- 22RS
Hi HN! I've been hacking on this side project for the last month or two with the goal of making it dead simple to use cloud GPUs. I ran into this problem personally during the phd, and built my own tooling around it. I always thought it'd be fun to try to turn that tooling into a more general product... and bitbop.io is the result! All you have to do is run `ssh bitbop.io`, and you get your own personal dev GPU workstation in the cloud. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
2024 · twitter.com
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Release 1.8.2 of wazero, the zero dependency WebAssembly runtime for Go, brings the amd64 compiler to 4 new OSes: NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, illumos and Solaris. The compiler also supports Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Windows, on amd64 and arm64. This didn't require any changes to the compiler, just enabling it after setting up tests to validate that it already worked. Now the HN hook: noticeably absent is OpenBSD, which I failed to get working, even after taking W^X into account (we already had that for arm64 on macOS). If you wanna help, please drop us a note!
2024 · github.com
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I just noticed it takes literally ~5 minutes to train millions parameters on slow CPU...but before you call Yudkowsky that "it's over", an important note: the main bottleneck is the corpus size, params are just 'cleverness' but given limited info it's powerless. Anyway, here is the project: https://github.com/bggb7781-collab/lrnnsmdds/tree/main couple of notes: 1. single C file, no dependencies. Below are literally all the "dependencies", not even custom header (copy paste from the top of the single c file): #define _POSIX_C_SOURCE 200809L #include #include…
Apr 2026 · raw.githubusercontent.com
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