Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Still coding in VC++ 6.0 after losing everything, living in a trailer
Hey HN, I spent 30 years writing CAD plugins in C++, mostly in Visual C++ 6.0. Then the industry collapsed. And I lost an intellectual lawsuit, my income dried up, and my marriage ended. Now I live alone in a trailer in rural Canada — still writing code, still surviving, trying to crawl back. This is a short video I made (50 seconds), documenting a quiet moment from this strange life. If you’ve ever hit rock bottom and kept going, you might relate. https://youtube.com/shorts/dDLSd3pfIYI?feature=share Thanks for watching. Just sharing — not selling anything.
This is a 50-second personal documentary video, not a software product. It documents the life of a software developer who spent three decades writing CAD plugins in Visual C++ 6.0, then faced industry collapse, legal… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1AF
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 2
I built Staying – a tool that instantly turns your code into interactive animations with no setup required. Just write or paste your code and hit "Visualize". No installs, no accounts, no configuration. *Supports*: Python, JavaScript & experimental C++
2025 · staying.fun · its alternatives →
- 3
2019 · youtube.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Hi HN! Korean high school senior here, about to start CS in college. I built a browser engine from scratch in C++ to understand how browsers work. First time using C++, 8 weeks of development, lots of debugging—but it works! Features: - HTML parsing with error correction - CSS cascade and inheritance - Block/inline layout engine - Async image loading + caching - Link navigation + history Hardest parts: - String parsing(html, css) - Rendering - Image Caching & Layout Reflowing What I learned (beyond code): - Systematic debugging is crucial - Ship with known bugs rather than chase…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Hi HN, we’re Nate and Ty, co-founders of Continue, an open-source autopilot for software development built to be deeply customizable and continuously learn from development data. It consists of an extended language server and (to start) a VS Code extension. Our GitHub is https://github.com/continuedev/continue. You can watch a demo of Continue and download the extension at https://continue.dev — — — A growing number of developers are replacing Google + Stack Overflow with Large Language Models (LLMs) as their primary approach to get help, similar to how…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Hey HN, I've been working on this side project for the past month. It generates a step-by-step tutorial guide for YouTube videos that you can follow along without watching long videos. Best suited for tutorial videos but can work for other videos aswell. No BS. Just straight to the point. The guides are generated from pure transcript so you don't have to worry about it being AI. It's my first project as a total beginner. Something I had to do inorder to get out of tutorial hell. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or if you face any problems or bugs. I would try to fix them to the…
2024 · stepify.tech · its alternatives →
- 7MP
I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →
- 8
Bindly▲76Hi HN, I’m a product designer by background, not a traditional software engineer. Over the last year, tools like Claude and ChatGPT completely changed how I work. I started with small internal tools, and now I’m “vibe coding” multiple highly personalized apps. As I iterated between Claude Code (implementation) and ChatGPT (ideation / thinking), I kept running into the same problem. To think clearly, I had to repeatedly re-explain: - what the code currently does, - what changed recently, - and why certain decisions were made. That re-summarization step became a real bottleneck. So I…
2016 · bind.ly · its alternatives →
- 9MP
My weekly(ish) video logs tracking my progress of building a completely sound statically typed language and structural editor. The motivation is to make lots of invalid programs unrepresentable.
2022 · petersaxton.uk · its alternatives →
- 10
Read an article yesterday about the H.264 codec increasing their licensing fee by an astronomical amount. And as always, my first shot was how hard could it be to try and build a codec which could be that efficient. I've personally been on a drive to improve my ability to one-shot complex features, products, or make even surgical changes. It's been a few months since I've been doing that, and honestly, results have been great for both work and work/life balance. This was a fun experiment. It burned through tokens, but it helped me identify some more improvements I could make to my…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Here's a video of it in action https://twitter.com/i/status/1667355251773526016 I didn't end up using it that much back then and no one else seems to have cared it existed, but it was a project I used to derust my programming skills and I'm to this day proud of the flamboyant design. To anyone reading this: you don't have to let your old code rot away in the graveyard of distant memories just because times change. With enough persistence and a little perseverance anything is possible. Code doesn't have an expiration date. -day
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 122G
4 months ago sucked. Our technical co-founder quit after 6 months and we still had no product. My co-founder and I had been 'working' on our startup for 8 months. I say 'working' because as the "business people" - there wasn't a whole lot we could do except philosophize. We had gotten really awesome intros to some of the top VCs and entrepreneurs, but had nothing to show. And now we felt stranded. Had we wasted 8 months of our lives? Identity crisis? Check. So we did what any rational person would do - we ran to the mountains. Literally. In Boone, NC - we talked about why we started Knowit,…
2012 · knowitapp.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Recall▲16One developer solves it. Every developer knows it.
Feb 2026 · recall.team · its alternatives →
- 14
VSCode was my daily driver for years, but once I started running several coding agents across multiple projects at the same time, it got in the way. One workspace with terminals in the bottom tray, no idea which agent was doing what and I found myself needing all the code editing tools less and less. So I built my own IDE around that workflow. Terminals are a first-class citizen, every project stays alive in the background with visual statuses. Close the workspace and come back weeks later, everything is still in its place. I've been using it for weeks and it's a big productivity boost. The…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Year in Code▲15Hey HN! I built Year in Code to turn your Claude Code usage into a beautiful Wrapped-style report (like Spotify Wrapped). If you use Claude Code with ccusage, it's super quick to try: Setup (2 minutes): 1. Run: `npx -y ccusage@latest daily --since 20250101 --until 20251231 --json > wrapped.json` 2. Upload at yearincode.xyz/2025 3. Get your report! *What you'll see:* - Total tokens - Activity streaks & patterns - Top models used - Shareable report Key features: - 100% secure: 100% browser processing, no server uploads - 2-minute setup: One npx command, upload JSON, done - Free & open…
Dec 2025 · yearincode.xyz · its alternatives →
- 16CC
Hi guys, Two days ago I published the fourth post in the series and thought it would now be a good time to look for additional feedback here on Hacker News. The aim of the series (as mentioned in the first post) is to inspire more people to start using Qt. My ambition is to answer the following questions "what is the gist of Qt?"; "what is the 20% that you need to know to develop 80% of the application?"; "what are the perhaps unknown unknowns?". In other words, I'm just covering basics: enough to understand the concepts and where to find additional information should you need it. Do you…
2018 · its alternatives →
- 17IM
I am a non-hacker "idea guy" with zero discernible talent. Like most, the story starts with me doing things the hard way. I dreamt of a tool that would save me countless hours. Like most of my ideas, it was supposed to die in a couple of hours, but this one had some legs.... "If I needed this, surely others did too" kept looping in my head. Could I get this built? Could I build it myself? Nah...too lazy to learn how, but before I did anything, I had to promise myself one thing: No more ideas! If ideas were sit-ups, I would have a six pack instead of this tire. It was a constant mental…
2012 · readwriteweb.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Earlier this year, I took a month to reexamine my coding habits and rethink some past design choices. I hope to rewrite and improve my FOSS libraries this year, and I needed answers to a few questions first. Perhaps some of these questions will resonate with others in the community, too. - Are coroutines viable for high-performance work? - Should I use SIMD intrinsics for clarity or drop to assembly for easier library distribution? - Has hardware caught up with vectorized scatter/gather in AVX-512 & SVE? - How do secure enclaves & pointer tagging differ on Intel, Arm, & AMD? - What's…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19IM
So, I'm learning VIM and made this yesterday, I pretend to increment it as I learn new stuff. You move with HJKL and that's it for now. Don't let the sublimes consume you. http://worms.io/vimwarrior/
2016 · its alternatives →
- 20M2
Hello Dear HN Folks. I would like to share with you my journey from testing to software engineer in test, then build engineer, DevOps engineer, cloud engineer, and software engineer today. It took me from 2004 to 2024 today. It was quite the ride and I tried to write down my experience during this journey. I still have doubts, fears and everything. I wanted to inspire those who also wished to embark on this journey that it's not impossible. It is hard though. Not gonna lie. And I had some luck along the way for sure. But with passion and stubbornness and determination one can go to places.…
2024 · skarlso.github.io · its alternatives →
- 21
Claude Code Companion. Done, Blocked, Broken - you'll know
May 2026 · thecodebreak.com · its alternatives →
- 22MP
Hi I'm the developer of UX-App if you have any questions then fire away :) Just thought I'd give you all some background. I'm a high school teacher by day and developer by night. I was bitten by the start-up bug a few years ago and UX-App is my first product launch. In between a full time job and a 5 month old at home it has taken about 3.5 years to complete the project. I'd like to think its a unique product that holds its own against the existing competition and even has some features that no other tool has. My favorite aspect is the visual code builder which allows designers to easily…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 23
I participated in the Nvidia + Vercel 2 hour hackathon in SF tonight, and built something I've wanted, but hadn't tried building. I implemented an MCP Server and VS Code extension to allow Claude Desktop to place breakpoints, step through code, and execute expressions (assuming language support). So you can ask it a question that requires actually stepping through the code and now it can actually do that - check values for you, etc. It's _definitely_ not perfect. Have improvements? Please make a PR!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24CG
Since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 I have been recording my university lectures for all of my courses and posting them online for free for anyone to watch. You can click the link for a YouTube playlist, or click the Google Spreadsheet for a breakdown of all the lectures of that course offering. Here is my standard response for those asking for the assignment files, which I unfortunately do not provide: https://www.cs.mun.ca/~dchurchill/teaching/youtube.txt
2024 · cs.mun.ca · 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 →