Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Tack, a fast lightweight scripting language for games and embedding
https://github.com/PlumeCat/tack Hi HN! Tack is a scripting language I've been working on sporadically for the past year or so, and intensely for the past few weeks. It originated out of a desire for something that was like Lua, but with a more familiar syntax, and without some of the other surprises in Lua such as the 1-indexed tables. It's also been a great learning project, and a very satisfying challenge! While the current version is early beta at best, I hope to continue working on it and maybe see some adoption. Despite the relative lack of optimization, I'm very…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Tack, a fast lightweight scripting language for games and embedding launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Hi friends, I started casually working on scrapscript in 2015. I built a few compilers over the years to test out various ideas/implementations, and I think I'm finally happy with the overall design. The code is not public yet. Email me at [email protected] if you're interested in joining the core team later this year. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback :)
2023 · scrapscript.org · its alternatives →
- 2
Hello HN! The day has finally come to stop adding features and start sharing what I've been building the last 5-6 months. It's a bit of CrewAI, OpenDevon, LangFuse/Cloud all in one, providing devs who prefer TypeScript an integrated framework thats provides a lot out of the box to start experimenting and building agents with. It started after peeking at the LangChain docs a few times and never liking the example code. I began experimenting with automating a simple Jira request from the engineering team to add an index to one of our Google Spanner databases (for context I'm the…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3MP
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 →
- 4
For a game I'm developing I needed an easy way to create hotspot areas on images. So I hacked together a small tool to do so and before I knew it, I had created an entire app :-) It allows you to generate JSON or YAML from the coordinates you tack on the image. tack runs entirely in your browser, there is no server side component to it, so good in terms of privacy. Hope this is helpful.
May 2026 · tack.pics · its alternatives →
- 5
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 →
- 6FT
After six months of work, I am here again presenting Fluent – a tiny lang which is optimized for differentiable & reactive programming. Since I am not Conal Elliot, don't expect a beautiful theoretical unification of FRP and AD from first principles. Rather, a horrific monster that holds together mostly because a lot of duct-tape. The link points to the semi-interactive tour of the language, which will get the job done much better than I could in here. Hope you hate/like it!
Jul 2026 · mlajtos.github.io · its alternatives →
- 7
Hi HN, While building RAG agents, I noticed a lot of token budget was wasted on formatting overhead (HTML tags, JSON structure, whitespace). Existing solutions felt too heavy (often requiring torch/transformers), so I wrote this lightweight, zero-dependency library to solve it. It includes strategies for context packing, PII redaction, and tool output compression. Benchmarks show it can save ~15% of tokens with negligible latency overhead (<0.5ms). Happy to answer any questions!
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
My wife and I recently submitted to a mobile game jam on Newgrounds (yes, it's still around). What started as a question of whether we could do it somehow morphed into whether we could do without so many of the seemingly needless complications rampant in our respective industries. My wife thus did all the art as traditional frame-by-frame animation (no puppets or tweening) and I preceded without a game engine. I did use a pre-processor that gives JS a Lisp syntax (Parenscript), because C-syntax is gross. We hope the end result, while definitely of small scope, will serve to inspire some…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9AD
Hi everyone, After four years, I'm finally open sourcing my little markup language that compiles directly to HTML, and has all the "modern" features built into the core, (reactive components, server side rendering, modules, bundling, etc.). No metaframework required! Feels like I really have something here, I'd love your feedback :)
2023 · a-dom.io · its alternatives →
- 10MA
Still pretty rough ... Emphasizes: 1) Simple, no-frill dashboard for managing posts (files). 2) Lightweight markdown editor 3) Relationships: taxonomy (file tagging) and fast linking (content to other posts) Some of the important key bindings I have are ctrl+c for code, ctrl-L for linking text to other posts. Right now this is baked in but I'd want to allow users to customize it. It's still pretty beta but let me know what ya'll think! Here's the github page if you want to help out: https://github.com/keera/matrix
2014 · ec2-54-83-122-123.compute-1.amazonaws.com · its alternatives →
- 11KA
Knit was created to solve pains of other LLM playgrounds. Some of the highlights: - Smart prompt builder, create prompt with simple requirement and few shot learning, fast and effortlessly. - Function call simulation, visualize the function callings and you can also setup a mocked value to return. - Support OpenAI/Anthropic/Azure models. - Manage prompts with projects and members. - And so much more! I have been developing Knit by myself for over 4 months now, and am looking for ways to improve it. Any feedback is appreciated.
2023 · promptknit.com · its alternatives →
- 12WS
This is the first project I haven't written a single line of code. The entire codebase was prompt generated in Cursor using mostly Claude Sonnet 4.5. It's also the first time I'm genuinely happy with the end result from AI coding. What do you think?
Dec 2025 · wordsnake.co · its alternatives →
- 13
A minimal "@ moving around a hardcoded map" implemented in a bunch of languages, some by me and some contributed by others. A slightly more interesting riff on the Hello World or 99 Bottles of Beer theme. More languages or improvements on existing ones would be nice :) There's a github repo at: https://github.com/nrkn/SimpleRL
2011 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
I’m experimenting with modeling tabletop RPG adventures as explicit narrative state rather than linear scripts. Everdice is a small web app that tracks conditional scenes and choice-driven state transitions to preserve continuity across long or asynchronous campaigns. The core contribution is explicit narrative state and causality, not automation. The real heavy lifting is happening in the DM Toolkit/Run Sessions area, and integrates CAML (Canonical Adventure Modeling Language) that I developed to transport narratives among any number of platforms. I also built the npm CAML-lint to…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
A lisp-looking language with interpreter and compiler to JS - mcapodici/badlanguage
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Howdy friends! Tell me if this is an atrociously terrible idea - I've been working on building a leetcode for clientside devs so we can practice React and Javascript interview questions in a more concise way, I call it clientside.dev I just finished a beta version of it yesterday and plan on releasing it with many more problems on Jan 1st but it's there if you wanna play with it open to any ideas / feedback however mean or nice it may be :)
2022 · vacation-call-335691.framer.app · its alternatives →
- 17
- 18BA
rts-blog : A blog about creating an RTS in WebGL
2017 · emnh.github.io · its alternatives →
- 19
Hi HN, Our research team just released the best performing and most efficient reranker out there, and it's available now as an open weight model on HuggingFace. Reranker v2 was designed specifically for agentic RAG, supports instruction following (our v1 was the first to introduce this), and is multilingual. Along with this, we're also open source our eval set, which allows you to reproduce our benchmark results. By releasing these datasets, we are also advancing instruction-following reranking evaluation, where high-quality benchmarks are currently limited. Please give it a try and let us…
2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
- 20
Hi HN, I'm one of the engine programmers at All Out Games (https://allout.game/), a multiplayer-first gaming UGC platform where creators can make and play games with their friends. For scripting we wanted our creators to be able to jump in and create game mechanics without having to think about networking. If a developer had to manually send packets to/from client/server to get things to happen then we have failed. It is particularly bad if you are using AI tools because they struggle to keep in mind what code is meant to run where (client, server, or both) and…
Mar 2026 · docs.allout.game · its alternatives →
- 21
Hi all, I threw together a small prototype I am calling “Notepad.ai”. A new take on UIs for interacting with LLMs. While I enjoy using LLM’s in the chat format I wanted to see what it would be like to do it in a more long form style. It let’s you write in a pretty free form, much like Window’s Notepad, but you can choose to hit ctrl+[ to analyze the text with a preset prompt of your choosing. It has a few other small features. It’s WIP and very experimental. I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Video: https://youtu.be/ntdlgFmSxQY Live Demo:…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
A PDF typesetting library with exact positioning and hyphenated line breaking - pkamenarsky/leerraum.js
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
I built LunarBasic because I wanted a modern recreation of BlitzBasic from back in the day. I wanted it to have good step debugging features, and I wanted it to compile down to a native binary with no external dependencies. I do know there's an open source BlitzBasic out there but I wanted something simpler and more concise. It does have a "pro" feature set, but for the foreseeable future, anyone joining up will have the pro version in perpetuity (eg I'm not trying to sell anything here). It's early (v0.8.0). Would love feedback on the language design and compiler output, especially from…
Aug 2026 · lunarbasic.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hi everyone, I've been working on this thing for a while. It transpiles Haml into Ruby, and then it streams patches to the browser which update the DOM. There is a memory leak in s.rb, which I'm not really sure how to solve. Seems like objects stay alive for longer than they should because of circular references or something but I'm not sure what's going on to be honest. I think this approach has potential though.
2023 · 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 →