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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Scripting language inspired by JavaScript and GLSL

I'm working on a scripting-language heavily inspired by Javascript and GLSL. The idea is to use this for a game engine I'm working on.

A scripting language combining JavaScript and GLSL syntax for game development. Designed by a developer building a custom game engine, this language aims to provide familiar web-like scripting 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. Scripting language inspired by JavaScript and GLSL launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1GS

    Hi all, I'm a PM by day who taught themselves to code over COVID. One of the things I enjoyed during that process was learning how to make basic games in Unreal Engine using Blueprints. I found visual scripting was such an intuitive way to express what I call "mid-tier complexity" logic and I felt there really wasn't a great equivalent for the web - so I built one over the last few months and this is my MVP. Tools like Zapier etc are great and easy to use, but they're heavily limited when it comes to expressing any kind of complex logic or trying to follow coding principles like DRY. On the…

    2023 · g-script.io · its alternatives →

  2. 2GJ
  3. 3

    Full gscript scripting language implementation using the GVM as a runtime environment. A language with objects, functions, strings, numbers and booleans. Easy to hack, understand, embed or modify. - gs-lang/README.md at master · geertvos/gs-lang

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    i made an esoteric programming language which i call spellscript. every program is a "spell" written in a "grimoire," and you have to use keywords like summon, enchant, inscribe, and conjure. it's literally read like a spellbook because the syntax consists of all natural language, and newlines are optional. your code can now be an essay, like everybody wants! for example, if you want to print something, you'd write: `begin the grimoire. inscribe whispers of "hello, world!". close the grimoire.` it has variables, dynamic typing, arrays, functions, conditionals, loops, string manipulation,…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    goboscript is a text-based programming language which compiles to Scratch. It allows you to write Scratch projects in text, and compile it into a .sb3 file - which can be opened in the Scratch editor, TurboWarp or be uploaded to the Scratch website. goboscript allows you to create advanced Scratch projects with ease, you can use any text editor, use a version control system such as git. You can refactor your code using search and replace. Text code can be copy pasted, which allows you to easily reuse code or share it with others. goboscript syntax is concise and easy to read. goboscript…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6D
    Darklang▲326

    2019 · medium.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7EG

    I made an animation programming language that you can type into a textarea. I make little games with it. Now other people can customize the games I make with it. I've been working on canvas language for 15 years now. Not very successful, but editable gifs turned out okay. Since it's my passion, I keep trying, and my latest is editable games - I'm not officially calling it that though. I've had some interest in advergames and this would allow designers to easily customize games for their clients - the hidden objects game being the best example for this, and the only one made specifically for…

    2025 · playscl.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Under: A simple game with procedural graphics in JavaScript and GLSL - westoncb/under-game

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hey HN I’ve been building *W++*, a scripting language that looks like Python but runs on the .NET runtime. It started as a fun side project, but it evolved into something surprisingly powerful — and potentially useful: Key Features: - Python-style syntax with semicolon-based simplicity - Compiles to .NET IL with experimental JIT support - Can run interpreted or compiled - Built-in CLI for managing projects, running, and building - Supports importing NuGet packages and converts them to .ingot modules automatically - MIT licensed and fully open-source You can even do things like: wpp import…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10AS

    Hello HN! I've been playing a lot with https://hyperscript.org/ recently (not to be confused with the other hyperhype hyperscript). I threw together a quick Wordle clone in an evening to see what it would look like using this language. The main functionality that is missing is checking for invalid words. The word dictionary is also very small, so it's very easy. The goal here wasn't really to create a good version of Wordle, it was to build 80% of Wordle in a different language to see what it looks like. Turns out, it looks pretty good! Stuff like using CSS rule precedence to…

    2022 · arhamjain.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    I've been spending some time coding fp. It is a programming language heavily inspired by the language John Backus described in his 1977 Turing Award lecture. There's plenty of examples in the projects github repository for the interested!

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    I spent the past 2 weeks making this toy programming language. I basically forked the Go scanner/parser, and changed the syntax to have functions return a single value. This enable proper Result/Option type to be used as well as propagating errors with an operator. I also wanted to have short "type inferred" anonymous functions to be able to use functions like Map/Reduce/Filter, without having to use 100 characters to specify the types.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13IC

    AntiLang is an interpreted programming language written in Go. The basic idea of this is to keep all the logical parts of a language same, but reverse the structure of it. The idea for this project came when I was having a long midnight conversation with my friend and thought of writing such a weird language. The initial draft was far worse than the current implementation; we thought of reversing the brackets and the language would be read from bottom to top. I'm happy that I dropped that idea Technical details: As the interpreter is written in Golang, I compiled it to WASM, and the whole…

    2025 · siruscodes.github.io · its alternatives →

  14. 14JS
  15. 15

    Hello HN, Just wanted to show this little 2D game engine that I've been working on for some time (around 2 years on the editor part, longer on some of the components). It's quite full featured but obviously this a project of such magnitude already that the work never really ends. That being said it's definitely already at a point where games can made and published. The editor runs natively on Windows and Linux using Qt5. The games can run on both Win and Linux as well as on WASM with WebGL. Feature wise there's a bunch of the stuff you'd expect. Audio, graphics, scripting,…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    GitHub repo: https://github.com/ArcadeMakerSources/ArcadeMaker (first of all, i want to say that I made this project for fun and challenge. I always wanted to create my own language. This has no business goal or something.) So the project is a 2D game engine (MonoGame backend) inspired by GameMaker 8. It includes its own IDE (built with WinForms) and an interpreted programming language that I wrote myself. The language—definitely the biggest challenge in the project—is a simple dynamically typed language. When I started, I had zero knowledge of how to build something like…

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17L

    2014 · luciotato.github.io · its alternatives →

  18. 18JP
  19. 19

    ArkScript is a small, fast, functional and scripting language for C++ projects - ArkScript-lang/Ark

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hi HN, author here. Happy to answer any questions. I had an itch to make a lisp like language that was a thin layer on top JavaScript. Something that could leverage the thriving ecosystem that exists around JavaScript. It's brittle, hot off the oven. Besides being a fan of parenthesis, I think macros fill in a gap that the JavaScript ecosystem today fills in with one-off compilers, bundler plugins and such. Macros can't do everything, but for example I think they have the potential to enable things like JSX, Solid and Svelte style libraries. Take the tour to get a feel for what it can do and…

    2023 · daklang.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21ID
  22. 22

    Hi HN, I built MOL, a domain-specific language for AI pipelines. The main idea: the pipe operator |> automatically generates execution traces — showing timing, types, and data at each step. No logging, no print debugging. Example: let index be doc |> chunk(512) |> embed("model-v1") |> store("kb") This auto-prints a trace table with each step's execution time and output type. Elixir and F# have |> but neither auto-traces. Other features: - 12 built-in domain types (Document, Chunk, Embedding, VectorStore, Thought, Memory, Node) - Guard assertions: `guard answer.confidence > 0.5 : "Too low"` -…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23DA

    DTL is a project that began it's life as part of a another piece of software for a startup I founded a few years ago. For that project I needed a way to describe how to rewrite data in a portable way. I needed to be able to create the rules on the fly and store them in a database, I needed them to be able to describe transformations I hadn't thought about, but also needed them to be safe and predictable. Though the startup didn't survive, the language I made was so useful to me I felt I had to extract it and make it usable to everyone. DTL is the result. Though the npm module is relatively…

    2022 · getdtl.org · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    I've been working on this small, slightly weird expression-oriented programming language for a little while now and feel ready to share it with others. I use it pretty often now in my day-to-day and work life, as a scratchpad for doing a bit of quick math or picking some pieces of data out of a JSON payload. Would really appreciate any feedback about the syntax, docs, features that are glaringly missing, etc. Before anybody mentions it: I know the performance is pretty lousy when dealing with a lot of data. If you can believe it, the runtime is about 100x faster than it used to be! Long term…

    2025 · blots-lang.org · its alternatives →

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