Work · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Self-contained Linux apps in Lisp
Not too long ago, a project of mine was shared here on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126052 In that thread I wrote: > I have this vision in my mind: embedding lone modules into sections of the lone ELF and shipping it out. Zero dependencies, self-contained. I've been working on that since that day. Proud to say I've gotten it to work and thought I'd make it the subject of my first Show HN. Some free software projects gained features along the way too. The link is to an article with a proper demonstration, technical details and what happened in the past few weeks.…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Self-contained Linux apps in Lisp launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1IW
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 →
- 2
Over the last year or so I have worked on a research linux distribution in my spare time. It’s not a distribution for researchers (like Scientific Linux), but my personal playground project to research linux distribution development, i.e. try out fresh ideas.
2019 · michael.stapelberg.ch · its alternatives →
- 3
This is a project I've wanted to write for a long time now. I really love the ideas from Nix and I still have a ton of respect for the project, but Nix-the-language never felt intuitive to me and I wanted something with more approachable tooling (although this was circa 2016, so I'm sure Nix has improved a lot since then too-- that was before Flakes were around!) Anyway, I started on the current iteration of Brioche about 6 months ago, and I finally cut an initial release. I'd still consider this a "technical preview" version (performance especially is pretty painful, so that'll be a focus…
2024 · brioche.dev · its alternatives →
- 4
Implementation of the standard is still not complete, but breakpoints and stepping work quite well! It also has some support for watchpoints, that no implementation has. Now it ships with ASDF and is capable of loading systems! Let me know if you like it. Support on Patreon or Liberapay is much appreciated
2025 · savannah.nongnu.org · its alternatives →
- 5IM
2013 · lispwebtales.ppenev.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Hi HN! I kept hearing about Lisp and why it was special but didn't have a great place to start. I wanted something self-contained that helped me develop intuition rather than fluency. My hope is this is helpful for casual programmers, professionals from other fields who interact with code, or engineers who haven't had much exposure to interpreters or compilers. Hope this helps anyone else who's curious about getting a sense of Lisp and what makes it special with a limited time investment! Feedback or other cool Lisp things welcome :)
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7MB
Hi, I spent the last year and a half writing a book on Docker and microservices, which was finally released on O'Reilly this week. "Using Docker: Developing and Deploying Software with Containers" takes a holistic approach, showing how containers can be used as the central artifact in a modern software development workflow. If anyone has any q's or feedback, please feel free to comment below. The book is available at: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035671.do (use code AUTHD for a discount)…
2016 · its alternatives →
- 8
This is a new and very preliminary Lisp implementation that is based on Common Lisp. The main goals are to minimize external dependencies. Currently only sbcl is supported. The only other dependency is on Quicklisp, which should strictly be necessary only for testing.
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9SC
Sometimes, I come across a handy tool or a frustrating issue in my daily workflow. If it's both, I might write a small program in a language I’m comfortable with to solve it. Except for ELisp... For some reason, it annoyed me so much that I couldn't stop writing in it. First, it was simple config tweaks, then small patches, and before I knew it, I was enjoying it. I ended up creating a few packages, and of course, with each one, I’d hit a new problem, push the old one aside, and start fresh. Just hoping I don’t forget to go back to it later. Well, I didn't and I'm slowly revisiting,…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 10
I recently encountered a situation where JetBrains IDEs weren't working for a project, and I wasn't even sure I wanted to keep paying the yearly fee. I decided to de-IDE myself and as part of it I decided to look at my options. The more I saw of Emacs the more interested I got. However using the Doom emacs distribution kind of threw me in the deep end without actually understanding how Emacs operates. I was lost and bounced off quick. I decided to take the approach of starting with vanilla Emacs and trying to get it to work for me as an IDE one step at a time. This post was me documenting…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
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 · its alternatives →
- 12
Portable Linux binaries, solved. Contribute to pg83/solo development by creating an account on GitHub.
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
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 →
- 14
Relatively simple currently, but figured I'd post for some feedback. I started this project last year but somewhat abandoned it. This feels like something which most likely already exists, but I couldn't find anything at the time I made it. I feel like my write up on the repo is pretty good at explaining the inspiration and purpose of this package; "Let's say you have an API, and you're looking for a method by which you can increase performance of your app via doing transformations of the data directly in the API. In this scenario, you would middleman the API returned data through a Fluxduct…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15SO
Hey HN, I wanted to share something I’ve been working on. My startup previously built B2B SaaS, and large enterprises sometimes wanted to self-host it for data residency reasons - but this was a nightmare to build and support. I chatted to other builders/founders and it seems this pain is pretty common. But people tolerate it because the biggest customers often require self-hosting. So we’ve built and open-sourced Shepherd to make it easier to manage these self-hosted deployments. It’s MIT licensed, and provides: 1 - Simplified deployment with a UI to create and manage Helm charts, for…
2025 · trustshepherd.com · its alternatives →
- 16
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 · its alternatives →
- 17WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016 · its alternatives →
- 18DD
Myself and three friends, for the last year have been building our own side project, the aim of this side project was to show off the creative side of developers. One of my bug bears with Reddit is how quickly things get buried. The bug bear has turned into the basis for what I been building on the side called The Full Stack. A platform to show off developer projects basically. Another bug bear of mine over the years has been trying to find open source or just cool side projects to work on with others, and even find teams to join. So that's another thing we've built, an easy way to find…
2023 · thefullstack.network · its alternatives →
- 19
Hi HN, I just wanted to share what I have been working on for the past few months: A firmware analyzer for embedded Linux systems that helps uncovering security issues running entirely in the browser. This is a very early Alpha. It is going to be rough around the edges. But I think it provides quite a lot of value already. So please go ahead and drop a firmware (only .tar rootfs archives for now) and try to break it :)
Mar 2026 · xray.boldwark.com · its alternatives →
- 20E0
Hi everyone, I've made a new experimental Lisp dialect (named "Element 0"). It comes with an interpreter written in Zig and a small standard library. The project is open source, and feedback is welcome. Project's GitHub repo: https://github.com/habedi/element-0
2025 · its alternatives →
- 21YA
I must say I was encouraged to post my project here when I saw the positive response to this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3780731 Before you make any comments, please keep in mind that the project is written for fun. I'm not forcing anyone to use it. In fact, nobody should use the current unstable version in a serious project. Here is the link: http://github.com/bsg/libserv Please share your thoughts. All criticisms are welcome, even the harsh ones. p.s. The project is still a work-in-progress.
2012 · its alternatives →
- 22CA
Imagine you have to make a little change in all your microservices, like changing a line in Dockerfile, but you have 50 microservices, ouch right! The PRs, pipelines, reviews... I have created a dashboard with a chatbot where you can simply ask "Update all repositories with alpine base image version X to Y", and then click next a bunch of time and see a list of PRs with their pipeline status. Hi friends I'm Daniel, the creator of Infra as AI. I was laid off from my SRE role a couple of months ago, and decided to build something that could always help me at work. My job was to keep the lights…
2025 · infrastructureas.ai · its alternatives →
- 23
Hey HN, I wrote a short book about the fundamental aspects of Clojure. The target audience is programmers with at least minimal experience who want to learn how to express solutions in Clojure (and perhaps in LISP, generally). If the price is a bit too steep for you, send me an email (address in bio), and I'll provide a discount coupon. If you can't afford it all, and believe the material may help you for studying or interview preparations, I can send you a free copy.
2025 · leanpub.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hi HN, Alexey from Chainstack here. We built Chainstack Self-Hosted to package everything we’ve learned from 8+ years of running blockchain nodes into a single control panel. The goal we’re building this product around is to make blockchain infrastructure boring to operate. The software is free to install. You only pay for the infrastructure you run it on. The quickest way to get hands-on with it is through the Vultr Marketplace or one of the other providers listed in the docs. The current release supports Ethereum Mainnet, Sepolia, and Hoodi with Reth + Prysm full nodes. We’ll be adding…
Jun 2026 · docs.chainstack.com · its alternatives →
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- I wrote a technical history book on Lisp alternatives
- distri: a Linux distribution to research fast package management alternatives
- Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager alternatives
- A Common Lisp implementation in development, supports ASDF alternatives
- I'm writing a leanpub book about Common Lisp web programming alternatives
- Lisp in Five Days alternatives
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 →