nowfound

Dev tools · August 26, 2023

GI

Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter

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

Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter launched on August 26, 2023 with 138 votes, #387 of 4,347 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.

Alternativestop 9% of August 2023

In plain words

Crumb is a garbage-collected, dynamically typed functional programming language implemented in C. Built by a freshman computer science student as preparation for an introductory Racket course, it demonstrates core interpreter concepts including memory management and functional language features. The project is open source and intended as a learning exercise in language implementation.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • Crumb2023 · github.com · ▲105

    A programming language that's fully functional

  • A work-in-progress C compiler from scratch2021 · github.com · ▲159

    Programming language that compiles into a x86 ELF executable. - riicchhaarrd/ocean

  • LC
    Learn C and its lower levels interactively, in the browser2019 · ▲356

    I made a simple virtual machine that runs C in the browser.This project is made as an experiment to see if C can be learned easier if the lower level is covered in paralel. Sandbox: https://vasyop.github.io/miniC-hosting Tutorial part 1: https://vasyop.github.io/miniC-hosting/?0 More info: https://github.com/vasyop/miniC-hosting/blob/master/README.md Please support this project: https://github.com/vasyop/miniC-hosting/blob/master/support.md

  • I'm 17 and wrote a guide on how to build your own programming language2024 · easel.hackclub.com · ▲149

    Hey! I’m JC. I’m 17 and part of Hack Club, a nonprofit where we help teenagers ship programming projects with their friends while growing technically. A while ago, I asked myself the question, “How exactly do programming languages work behind the scenes?” It seemed really daunting until I went to a half hour workshop at a high school hackathon about writing a tree-walk interpreter and realized that getting started was actually super fun. This guide is designed in the vein of that - to get people, especially teenagers, started on learning how to build a programming language in a literal…

  • IW
    I wrote a technical history book on LispFeb 2026 · berksoft.ca · ▲252

    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…

  • I wrote a minimal memory allocator in CNov 2025 · github.com · ▲137

    A fun toy memory allocator (not thread safe, that's a future TODO). I also wanted to explain how I approached it, so I also wrote a tutorial blog post (~20 minute read) covering the code which you can find the link to in the README.

Questions this answers

More dev tools this month

the category →
  • Contribute to oosexgang/hackios-xnu-kernel development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Dev tools · 2d ago · github.com

  • /dev/null▲492

    a social network for devs

    Dev tools · 5d ago · dev-null.sh

  • Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Dev tools · 28d ago · github.com

  • OpenBot▲362

    Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer

    Dev tools · 25d ago · openbot.run

  • Talanoa▲346

    Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…

    Dev tools · 23d ago · talanoa.email

  • Open standard for tracking agent run costs

    Dev tools · 27d ago · openaudr.dev

Source: Show HN post ↗

Launched alongside, August 2023

the whole month →
  • Resend▲1,325

    An entire collection of pre-built components with a much faster development experience.

    Dev tools · 2023 · resend.com

  • STORI AI▲1,316

    Your ideas become visually compelling branded social posts

    AI · 2023 · storiai.com

  • Kombai▲1,079

    A new AI model that you can prompt with UI designs

    AI · 2023 · kombai.com

  • Understand your audience without 50 interviews

    AI · 2023 · founderpal.ai

  • Lottielab▲869

    Create and ship lottie animations to sites and apps faster

    Dev tools · 2023 · lottielab.com

  • Outlines is a Python library that focuses on text generation with large language models. Brandon and I are not LLM experts and started the project a few months ago because we wanted to understand better how the generation process works. Our original background is probabilistic, relational and symbolic programming. Recently we came up with a fast way to generate text that matches a regex (https://blog.normalcomputing.ai/posts/2023-07-27-regex-guide...). The basic idea is simple: regular expressions have an equivalent Deterministic-Finite Automaton (DFA) representation. We…

    AI · 2023 · github.com