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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Salt – a systems language with Z3 theorem proving in the compiler

Hey HN, I wanted to share the new online playground for Salt (https://salt-lang.dev/playground/), a sovereign systems language designed for high-performance, distributed workloads where paying an "abstraction tax" is no longer acceptable. We started building Salt to bridge the gap between the raw power of manual pointer arithmetic and the safety guarantees of modern high-level languages. The architecture relies on an MLIR-based backbone and a Z3-powered "formal shadow," and the design is rooted in three main pillars: Fast Enough: The target is to stay within 20% of C's…

Salt is a systems programming language that integrates Z3 theorem proving directly into its compiler. It is designed for developers building low-level software who need formal verification capabilities alongside… 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

    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 →

  2. 2GI

    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 →

  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. 4

    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 →

  5. 5

    An implementation of a dynamic programming language in Rust. Includes: Parser/Compiler, REPL, Virtual Machine, Bytecode Disassembler This started out as a learning project to teach myself Rust. It has grown into a decently substantial piece of software and I've learned quite a bit in the process! Some neat things: + A garbage collector that can store dynamically sized types without any double-indirection (i.e. I have my own Box implementation with manual alloc/dealloc) + The smart pointer used to reference GCed data is a thin pointer. The ptr metadata needed for DSTs is stored in…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Meta programming utilities for C++14. Merged in matt-42/lithium - matt-42/iod

    2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7AR

    2021 · guillaume.baierouge.fr · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    This is a hobby project of mine that I started a few years ago to learn about programming language implementation. It was created 95% without AI, although a few recent commits include code from Gemini CLI. I started out following Crafting Interpreters, but gradually branched off that until I had almost nothing left in common. Tech stack: Rust, Cranelift (JIT compilation), LALRPOP (parser). Original title: "A small programming language where everything is a value" (edited based on comments)

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hey HN, I find myself reaching for tools like it-tools.tech or other random sites every now and then during development or debugging. So, I built a toolkit with a sane and simple CLI interface for most of those tools. For the curious and lazy, at the moment, ut has tools for, - Encoding: base64 (encode, decode), url (encode, decode) - Hashing: md5, sha1, sha224, sha256, sha384, sha512 - Data Generation: uuid (v1, v3, v4, v5), token, lorem, random - Text Processing: case (lower, upper, camel, title, constant, header, sentence, snake), pretty-print, diff - Development Tools: calc, json…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Programming language that compiles into a x86 ELF executable. - riicchhaarrd/ocean

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Sage is a Rust-like programming language built on a brainfuck-inspired VM with LLVM-like properties. https://github.com/adam-mcdaniel/sage Check out the web-demo to run the compiler in the browser, along with a graphical example using JavaScript interop! https://adam-mcdaniel.net/sage Sage is designed to be portable, but also useful. To prove its usefulness, I used it to implement a user-space for a new operating system: SageOS https://github.com/adam-mcdaniel/sage-os The language also runs on embedded devices, like the flipper zero!

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Simple Saltstack-like deployment system in 2k lines of Python - mattbillenstein/salty

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13FS

    Hi HN! I've been working on the fuse programming language, it's a statically typed purely functional language with higher-kinder types and ad-hoc polymorphism. It compiles to the GRIN whole-program optimizer, producing LLVM-generated native code. Fuse supports ADTs, Generics, Type Methods, Traits, Pattern matching etc. all in a functional style with no mutations. I’ve been developing the language for 5 years, with code written in Scala. I’ve started coding the language from the base of System F that was implemented as part of the book: Types and Programming Languages (tapl). And then…

    Aug 2026 · fuselang.org · its alternatives →

  14. 14

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

    2015 · books.thoughtbot.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Bon is a programming language designed with simplicity, performance, and safety in mind. - daniel-p-gonzalez/bon

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Wrote this to learn more about the `chumsky` parser combinator library, rustyline, and the `ariadne` error reporting crate. Such a nice DX combo for writing new languages. Still a work in progress, but I thought I'd share :)

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

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

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18IB

    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 →

  19. 19

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

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    A Positively Charged JavaScript Runtime . Contribute to alshdavid-public/ion development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21DA

    2015 · cdn.rawgit.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    A native, statically typed Lisp with a REPL that compiles to Odin. - kvist-lang/kvist

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I'm writing a compiler for a systems language focused on concurrency and parallelism. It’s a re-engineering of a prior work, with an explicit emphasis on memory management and type safety, plus first-class parallel primitives at the language level. The language is now capable of compiling a substantial portion of its own source code to tokens using a single-pass C back-end. The self-hosted compiler includes a handwritten lexer and a parser, with an arena-based allocator to support fast compilation and eliminate GC complexity. The primary goals for the project are: First-class parallel and…

    Nov 2025 · axelang.org · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    I've always been fascinated by cryptographic principles, so I decided to dive deep into zero-knowledge proofs and implement a Groth16 proof verifier entirely in Rust. This project validates cryptographic proofs and demonstrates how succinct, verifiable computations can be achieved. Using Rust's powerful libraries like arkworks, I implemented pairing checks, public input commitments, and proof validation logic while ensuring the code remains modular and efficient. I handled the complexities of affine group operations, scalar multiplications, and optimized public input verification to make…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

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