Alternatives
Products that do what Xlerb – A Compiled "Forth" for the Beam does
Hello I've been working on a small stack language for the BEAM in my free time called 'Xlerb'. I read Starting Forth and thought it would be interesting to see if you could send messages to other stacks etc, and the BEAM seemed like a great fit. Xlerb is a small leex/yecc grammar and a simple-ish compiler that takes Forth-ish code and turns it into regular BEAM modules. The modules it produces just export functions from stack to stack, so there's a good interop story with Elixir/Erlang (if you'd ever want to do that?). I've the syntax a bit beyond a 'strict' forth with pattern…
- 1IB
This weekend I created stacklib.h - a single-header library that brings Forth-style stack operations to C. It implements a basic interpreter with: - Stack operations (push/pop/dup/swap/over/drop) - Arithmetic (+, -, *, /) - Output (., emit, cr) - Stack inspection (.s, depth) Example usage: Stack s; stack_init(&s); dict_init(); exec(&s, "10 20 + ."); // Prints "30" exec(&s, "1 2 3 4 .s"); // Shows stack contents The library is self-contained, requires no dependencies, and handles basic error checking. It was inspired by wanting to understand…
Sep 2025
- 2SA
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
- 3BA
I've built many interpreters over the years, and Bolt represents my attempt at building the scripting language I always wanted. This is the first public release, 0.1.0! I've felt like most embedded languages have been moving towards safety and typing over years, with things like Python type hints, the explosive popularity of typescript, and even typing in Luau, which powers one of the largest scripted evironments in the world. Bolt attempts to harness this directly in the lagnauge rather than as a preprocessing step, and reap benefits in terms of both safety and performance. I intend to be…
2025 · github.com
- 4PB
2021 · github.com
- 5IM
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
- 6IW
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
- 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
- 8AH
Long-simmering side project that is finally ready to see the light. HAMTs are a cool persistent data structure and implementing one has been a lot of fun. Beyond the code, there is likely some value in the extensive and largely complete implementation docs; basic benchmarks are linked in the README, too. Kind of aiming to be "the libavl for HAMTs". That is obviously a high and aspirational bar but a distinct possibility if it stirs up a little interest and/or contribution. Anyways, it's time for this to go out, collect feedback and maybe even some use outside of toy projects. Let me…
2023 · github.com
- 9GI
Hi all! I'm going into my freshman year, and figured that the best way to prepare for the intro to programming Racket course would be to implement my own garbage-collected, dynamically typed, functional programming language in C ;) Anyways... here's the repo: https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb I started learning C over the summer, so I still have a whole lot to learn... Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! :D
2023
- 10SA
Hi HN! Silk is a project I began working on approximately six months ago without any prior experience or knowledge of compiler design, and it's been a frustrating but fun learning experience. It is very much a work in progress, but I would love to hear feedback of any kind!
2020 · ajaymt.github.io
- 11CE
Hello! This is the most useless thing I did in quite some time, but it was fun. Compile erlang (actually BEAM) to wasm, statically link with a small http wrapper and run as a request handler under wasmtime. This is not very practical as of now and you better just compile atomvm and statically link it with erlang payload if you really need to run erlang on the edge node (you don't). When (if) typed continuations become a thing, this should also allow for erlang actor model.
2024 · github.com
- 12IM
https://github.com/siraben/zkeme80 As a successor to my previous project[1], a Forth interpreter that runs under the TI operating system, I decided to go all the way and write my own assembler and OS. This is a project I've been working on for just over a month, but there's still a long way to go. The idea is to have a kernel + the Forth interpreter and compiler, then users can modify how their operating system works through the Forth files. My Forth implementation is mostly ANS-standard conforming, so most code should work right out of the box without any problem. See…
2019
- 13BA
Hi HN, I'm the author. I built this project for two simple reasons: I've always used higher-level languages and wanted to finally understand what's happening "under the hood" of an interpreter. I also wanted a real project to force me to "power up" my C skills, especially with manual memory management and reference counting. The result is ToyForth, a minimal interpreter for a Forth-like language, written from scratch in C, stack-based. I focused on making the code clean and understandable. It's broken down into a few simple parts: A parser that turns source text into a list of objects…
Nov 2025 · github.com
- 14LP
Hi! I am doing a learning project, attempting to build an imperative language (and interpreter). The end product will be useless for others, I just want to learn and better understand how to build imperative languages. :) If someone else shares this interest and want to give some good hints on good resources I would be grateful. Currently I am looking at an awesome text by Bob Nystrom. All suggestions and tips on resources are most welcome. I am very much a beginner in this, but I find this topic very fascinating. Mail me or post links here! Cheers! You can try a beta version Online at…
2020
- 15
One binary. HTTP, dataframes, Excel, S3 and AI built in.
Jul 2026 · docs-orion.onrender.com
- 16CW
Hello HN, This is a project of mine which contains a working, self-hosting, Forth interpreter for a single instruction machine. The instruction is called "SUBLEQ", short for (SUB)tract and branch if (L)ess than or (EQ)ual. Everything has to be synthesized from that instruction, bitwise operators have to be implemented in terms of repeated subtraction and self modifying code used to create indirect loads and stores. In doing this it is possible to port a working language that is capable of generating new images for the machine. It's possible to play with it online at:…
2023 · github.com
- 17AS
Hi HN, I’ve been working on an experimental programming language called XXML. The project started from a frustration I kept running into across systems languages: Languages with strong ownership tend to avoid runtime reflection. Languages with rich reflection usually rely on GC or give up memory guarantees. Compile-time code generation often requires a separate macro language. I wanted to explore whether those tradeoffs are truly necessary. What XXML is trying to do XXML is a statically-typed, native language that: Uses explicit ownership and borrowing (no garbage collector) Supports runtime…
Dec 2025 · xxml-language.com
- 18UL
I kept rewriting the same array.slice(i, i + n) logic in every project. Eventually, I decided to stop and just make a utility. Chonkify is a small (~870B), zero-dependency JS/TS library for chunking any kind of data: - Works with Array, String, Buffer, Set, Map, Array-like, TypedArray - Handles AsyncIterable (great for batching streams) - Unicode-safe (correctly handles grapheme clusters, emoji, etc.) - ESM-first, TypeScript-ready I mostly made it for myself, but figured others might find it useful too. Would love feedback!
2025 · github.com
- 19AN
2013 · github.com
- 20IB
After fine-tuning GPT for a personal project, I realized how tedious it is to write plain text in a massive JSON file. That's why I built this app for my own use, and I want to see if others could benefit from a tool like this as well ;)
2024 · finetuna-ui.com
- 215D
597 days ago, I posted about the project our team was developing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183322 - here on HN, and today we're finally taking the wraps off what we've been working on since then. At it's core, what we've been building is an end-to-end solution for creating, storing, and working with structured content in a way that's accessible to anyone. You can check out an introduction - http://team.marquee.by/introducing-marquee/ and dig into the technical/philosophical details of our approach -…
2013
- 22AL
Hi HN, I build this a few months back, thinking about improving it but wanted to share as is first to see what feedback I can get. I built it to be modular and with a clean understandable codebase in mind so easily extendable. I want to add more components to it maybe... Thanks! Will add link to the repo in a comment now
2022
- 23UA
Hey HN! After using a combination of Unsloth and Axolotl a lot, and finding it generally painful to figure out the right performance tuning for things like batch sizing and multi-GPU sharding, I wrote a small Python lib that sets up known-good LoRA training configurations for Llama 3.1 8B and 70B Instruct, and includes helpers for distilling from larger models or training on serverless finetuning platforms, and includes a walkthrough for distilling DeepSeek-R1 into a Llama 3.1 8B LoRA... But you can use it for pretty much any finetuning task, not just distilling large models!
2025 · github.com
- 24RC
Considering all the supply chain dependencies lately I've been building a collection of C89 libraries to make zero dependency stuff. For fun I have also been programming it in latin! Still very much in progress.
Nov 2025 · github.com
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