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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to SimBricks – Modular Full-System Simulation for HW-SW Systems

Hi HN, we are building SimBricks, an open-source simulation framework for heterogeneous systems, especially with custom hardware. SimBricks modularly combines existing simulators for machines, networks, and hardware, allowing you to build, test, and evaluate intricate complete systems in a virtual environment. Head over to the SimBricks website (https://simbricks.github.io/, also has a quick demo video) to learn more. We have pre-built docker images, and you can even immediately play around on codespaces. Concrete use-cases: - Evaluate HW accelerators, from early design with…

SimBricks is an open-source simulation framework that combines existing simulators for machines, networks, and hardware to model complete heterogeneous systems in a virtual environment. Designed for hardware and… 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. SimBricks – Modular Full-System Simulation for HW-SW Systems launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

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    Hey HN, Waleed here. We're building Sim (https://sim.ai/), an open-source visual editor to build agentic workflows. Repo here: https://github.com/simstudioai/sim/. Docs here: https://docs.sim.ai. You can run Sim locally using Docker, with no execution limits or other restrictions. We started building Sim almost a year ago after repeatedly troubleshooting why our agents failed in production. Code-first frameworks felt hard to debug because of implicit control flow, and workflow platforms added more overhead than they removed. We wanted…

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Sim▲577

    Open-source workspace for AI agents and workflows

    Jul 2026 · sim.ai · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    SimplAIfree tier, from $5/mo▲589

    Hey HN, I've been building SimplAI for the past several months — it's a platform for building, testing, and deploying LLM-powered agents and multi-step workflows. The problem I kept running into: spinning up an AI agent pipeline means stitching together prompt management, tool calling, memory, evals, and deployment — often from scratch every time. SimplAI tries to be the layer that handles all of that so you can focus on what your agent actually does. What it does: - Visual + code-first workflow builder for chaining LLM calls, tools, and APIs - Built-in prompt versioning and A/B testing…

    2025 · simplai.ai · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hey! I built a playground called Advent of Distributed Systems (https://aods.cryingpotato.com/) where you can work through the Fly.io distributed systems challenges (https://fly.io/dist-sys/1/) directly in your browser. Running challenges like this directly in the browser has often been the best way for me to get the activation energy to start them since it bypasses all the annoying dev environment setup that has to happen as a precursor to working on it. The coding environment was built with another project I'm working on called Cannon…

    2023 · aods.cryingpotato.com · its alternatives →

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    To try it out, simply build the project yourself from source, or use attached bootable ISO image of the system (in Releases on Github) and run it in QEMU. https://blog.vxn.dev/rou2exos-rusted-edition

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    Archimyst▲162

    AI-powered platform for designing system architecture

    Jan 2026 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    SIMD noise library for Rust. Contribute to verpeteren/rust-simd-noise development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Hi HN community! We want to share AI-town, a deployable starter kit for building and customizing your own version of AI simulation - a virtual town where AI characters live, chat and socialize. Inspired by great work from the Stanford Generative Agent paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442). A few features: - Includes a convex.dev backed server-side game engine that handles global state - Multiplayer ready. Deployment ready - 100% Typescript - Easily customizable. You can fork it, change character memories, add new sprites/tiles and you have a custom AI simulation…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Simulation software reinvented for the web

    2015 · simscale.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    HVM1 (2022): a massively parallel, optimal functional runtime in Rust - HigherOrderCO/HVM1

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11WM

    Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…

    2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    Hopper▲100

    Hi HN, we’re Sai and Aayush, and we’re building Hypercubic (https://www.hypercubic.ai/), bringing AI tools to the mainframe and COBOL world. (We did a Launch HN last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45877517.) Today we’re launching Hopper, an agentic development environment for mainframes. You can download it here: https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper, and you can also request access and immediately get a mainframe user account to play with. There's also a video runthrough at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q81L5DcfBvE.…

    May 2026 · hypercubic.ai · its alternatives →

  13. 13IM

    Hi HN, I made some animations of the most important kinds of transistors using my semiconductor simulation, details of which are on the page. I tried to make the visuals as realistic as possible while also aiming for clarity. If you want to go beyond the charge carriers and look at, for example, the electric field, you can do so in the simulation software. The desktop software also has less common devices like IBGTs and SCRs that have similar animations. The last thread about my software was posted here about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43942279

    Jul 2026 · brandonli.net · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    A multitasking monolithic Kernel based x86 targeting Operating System written in C# from scratch aiming for high-level implementation of drivers in managed environment. - amaneureka/AtomOS

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15VA

    VoxelChain is an experimental tool to create voxel worlds in the browser. The lighting is fully ray traced in real-time and there is powerful cellular-automata based programming system, which allows to create complex digital circuits and model the behaviour of voxels (behaviour such as falling sand or water). Technology wise, I'm using WebGL2 for the rendering and the simulation is coded in C89 and gets compiled to WebAssembly (with multi-threading) using Clang. The simulation is basically a custom cellular automaton and is fully parallelized. Once WebGPU is released, I'm planning to run the…

    2022 · voxelchain.app · its alternatives →

  16. 16
    Modo▲148

    I’ve built hardware projects for years, and the gap between “I want X” and “parts ordered, files ready to print” always took weeks. Modo compresses that. Describe what you want (e.g. “a portable CO2 monitor with a display and buzzer”) and it generates: - A bill of materials with real components (MPNs, not hallucinated parts) - A printable enclosure generated from actual part dimensions - Wiring diagrams, firmware boilerplate, and assembly instructions - Design validation (power budget, pin conflicts, mechanical fit) Everything streams in real time as each phase completes. The key idea is…

    Jan 2026 · modo.is · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hi HN! I've built [CXXStateTree](https://github.com/ZigRazor/CXXStateTree), a modern C++ header-only library to create hierarchical state machines with clean, intuitive APIs. It supports: - Deeply nested states - Entry/exit handlers - State transitions with guards and actions - Asynchronous transitions with `co_await` (C++20 coroutines) - Optional runtime type identification for flexibility It's ideal for complex control logic, embedded systems, games, robotics, and anywhere you'd use a finite state machine. I’d love feedback, use cases, or contributions from the…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Agent tooling for generative LEGO models building, built with Astra and Opus 5.5, powered by Jev - anteloc/ldraw-nova

    20d ago · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19MC
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    Just sharing this project [0] I've worked on a while ago, it's not that interesting but I was proud of making it. It has a CLI and a GUI that is done with Dear ImGui and includes an instruction editor, memory and registers viewer, and a canvas that is manipulated with an extra instruction made specifically for the GUI! This is not my first attempt at a virtual machine implementation, I've done the popular LC-3 VM before [1], check it out if you're interested to see Rust code rather than C++ ;) [0]: https://github.com/faresbakhit/vole-sim [1]:…

    2025 · faresbakhit.github.io · its alternatives →

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  22. 22

    Generic Hearthstone game simulator. Contribute to oyachai/HearthSim development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23IB

    Have fun learning more about the Qt Quick Rendering engine, starting with a ground plane, in this Minecraft-esque 3D block building game.

    2021 · kdab.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hey HN, just wanted to share a fun, vibe-coded Friday night experiment: a little playground for writing cellular automata in a subset of Rust, which is then compiled into WGSL. Since it lets you dynamically change parameters while the simulation is running via a TUI, it's easy to discover weird behaviors without remembering how you got there. If you press "s", it will save the complete history to a JSON file (a timeline of the parameters that were changed at given ticks), so you can replay it and regenerate the discovery. You can pan/zoom, and while the main simulation window is in…

    Feb 2026 · 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 →