Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to val – An arbitrary precision calculator language
Wrote this to learn more about the `chumsky` parser combinator library, rustyline, and the `ariadne` error reporting crate. Such a nice DX combo for writing new languages. Still a work in progress, but I thought I'd share :)
val is an arbitrary precision calculator language built as a learning project to explore Rust parsing and error reporting tools. It provides a command-line interface for mathematical calculations with high precision… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1VT
Hey HN! We're so excited to show you Val Town (https://val.town)! A "val" is a JavaScript/TypeScript function or value that runs on our servers. We aim to get you from idea to running code in seconds: type code, run it, get its API endpoint, schedule it - all from the browser, in a couple keystrokes. We're a startup of 4 people, mostly in NYC. We've been working on this for 6 months and are eager for feedback from the HN community. Why do we need yet another online coding IDE? While researching devtools[1], I found myself wanting something halfway between Replit and Zapier: a…
2023 · val.town · its alternatives →
- 2
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 →
- 3
This is a hobby project of mine that I started a few years ago to learn about programming language implementation. It was created 95% without AI, although a few recent commits include code from Gemini CLI. I started out following Crafting Interpreters, but gradually branched off that until I had almost nothing left in common. Tech stack: Rust, Cranelift (JIT compilation), LALRPOP (parser). Original title: "A small programming language where everything is a value" (edited based on comments)
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Kotlin Money▲427Manipulating monetary amounts is a common computing chore. However, no mainstream language has a first-class data type for representing money, it’s up to programmers to code abstractions for it. This isn’t an issue per se until dealing with rounding issues from operations like installment payments (e.g., buy now, pay later), foreign exchange, or even simple things like fee processing and tax collection. Inspired by my days at N26 Brasil dealing with these challenges, I introduce Money: a Kotlin library that makes monetary calculations and allocations easy.
2024 · blog.eriksen.com.br · its alternatives →
- 5
Hey HN, I find myself reaching for tools like it-tools.tech or other random sites every now and then during development or debugging. So, I built a toolkit with a sane and simple CLI interface for most of those tools. For the curious and lazy, at the moment, ut has tools for, - Encoding: base64 (encode, decode), url (encode, decode) - Hashing: md5, sha1, sha224, sha256, sha384, sha512 - Data Generation: uuid (v1, v3, v4, v5), token, lorem, random - Text Processing: case (lower, upper, camel, title, constant, header, sentence, snake), pretty-print, diff - Development Tools: calc, json…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
An implementation of a dynamic programming language in Rust. Includes: Parser/Compiler, REPL, Virtual Machine, Bytecode Disassembler This started out as a learning project to teach myself Rust. It has grown into a decently substantial piece of software and I've learned quite a bit in the process! Some neat things: + A garbage collector that can store dynamically sized types without any double-indirection (i.e. I have my own Box implementation with manual alloc/dealloc) + The smart pointer used to reference GCed data is a thin pointer. The ptr metadata needed for DSTs is stored in…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
This C library is part of a main project aimed at providing a reactive key-value (KV) database. The data is typed (numbers, strings, dates, or booleans) and can include formulas with references to other entries. Clients connected to this database receive a real-time data stream with updates to the subscribed keys, allowing them to react to changes and their dependencies. Essentially, it’s like building a distributed Excel, where data and formulas dynamically update across the system. I couldn’t find any libraries that offered the full set of features I needed for evaluating expressions, so I…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
See what it’s like to program in a language without null.
2015 · books.thoughtbot.com · its alternatives →
- 9
SIMD-accelerated UTF-8 validation for Rust. Contribute to rusticstuff/simdutf8 development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10IM
https://github.com/siraben/ti84-forth Hi HN! For the past year I've been getting into programming in Z80 assembly (especially for the TI-84+). More recently I've been learning about the Forth programming language and after a lot of searching online (in vain) for a Forth interpreter for the TI-84, I decided to write one myself. It's been fun demoing this to others, because it's a very unexpected use of a calculator. It's my largest project to date, and I'm interested to know what the HN community thinks, please feel free to critique my code! -- Ben
2018 · its alternatives →
- 11VT
Hello! We at Val Town have spent the last couple months redesigning our product around a new core primitive: Val Town Projects. Why: Our prior core primitive, a "val", was too small. A val is just a single hosted JavaScript file. Users kept bumping up against rough edges managing lots of disparate vals. What: A Val Town Project is a group of vals, files, and folders, versioned collectively. They support branches, forks, and merges. How: We made the sacrilegious decision to not build on git. We instead built a simplified system that works directly in our postgres database. Our dream is that…
2025 · blog.val.town · its alternatives →
- 12
🧮 Small library for big decimal numbers. Contribute to bpierre/dnum development by creating an account on GitHub.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
🔬 a C++ compiler middle-end, using an LLVM backend - artagnon/rhine
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14MW
2012 · texodus.github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Hey HN, I wanted to share the new online playground for Salt (https://salt-lang.dev/playground/), a sovereign systems language designed for high-performance, distributed workloads where paying an "abstraction tax" is no longer acceptable. We started building Salt to bridge the gap between the raw power of manual pointer arithmetic and the safety guarantees of modern high-level languages. The architecture relies on an MLIR-based backbone and a Z3-powered "formal shadow," and the design is rooted in three main pillars: Fast Enough: The target is to stay within 20% of C's…
Jul 2026 · salt-lang.dev · its alternatives →
- 16LA
Hi HN, I made Lingo - the SQLite of semantic search. I'm a self-taught developer and researcher who left school at 16, and I've spent some time exploring a first-principles approach to system design for various frontier problems. In this case it's AI that challenges the 'bigger is better' transformer paradigm. Lingo is the first piece of that research, a high-performance linguistic database designed to run on-device. The full technical overview and manifesto is here: https://medium.com/@robm.antunes/bcd1e9752af6 The paper has been archived on Zenodo with a DOI:…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 17RM
2021 · hexdocs.pm · its alternatives →
- 18
A library for encoding (and decoding) u64s into usually fewer than eight bytes.
2023 · crates.io · its alternatives →
- 19
A native Rust library for Delta Lake, with bindings into Python - delta-io/delta-rs
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
🧩 Shape-Safe Symbolic Differentiation with Algebraic Data Types - breandan/kotlingrad
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Hey HN, My friend Sam and I were bored one weekend, and wanted to make something self-contained but still useful. We ended up with Victor [0], a vector database designed to run in the browser. It’s written in Rust, which gives us access to things like super-fast and compact serialization and deserialization, but it’s compiled to WASM and uses web-sys to interact with the browser’s JS APIs to write the database contents to disk. We worked hard on designing it in a way that makes sense for the browser. It uses the private origin file system [1] and stores the vectors in a compact format (one…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Embeddable or standalone robust floating-point polynomial calculator written in Rust. - alfanick/xxcalc-rs
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
2020 · handsonscala.com · its alternatives →
- 24SA
Hey HN, I’m a physicist turned quant. Some friends and I 'built' SymDerive because we wanted a symbolic math library that was "Agent-Native" by design, but still a practical tool for humans. It boils down to two main goals: 1. Agent Reliability: I’ve found that AI agents write much more reliable code when they stick to stateless, functional pipelines (Lisp-style). It keeps them from hallucinating state changes or getting lost in long procedural scripts. I wanted a library that enforces that "Input -> Transform -> Output" flow by default. 2. Easing the transition to Python: For many…
Feb 2026 · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Val Town – A Cloud Scripting Site alternatives
- ScrapScript – A tiny functional language for sharable software alternatives
- A small programming language where everything is pass-by-value alternatives
- Kotlin Money alternatives
- ut – Rust based CLI utilities for devs and IT alternatives
- I'm making a dynamic language in Rust 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 →