AutoLISP interpreter in Rust/WASM
a CAD workflow invented 33 yrs ago
Details
- External ID
- 46393271
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- AutoLISP interpreter in Rust/WASM
- Website domain
- acadlisp.de
- Launched
- Dec. 26, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 137
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9236641221374046
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- developer tools and programming utilities
- Vertical
- Construction
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- autolisp interpreter for cad workflows
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Building a simple LISP evaluator in Rust/WASM is straightforward, but fully supporting AutoLISP's historical AutoCAD dialect, stateful CAD environment primitives, and DXF/SVG rendering requires deep legacy format knowledge.
What it would actually take: Requires an AST parser and tree-walking interpreter in Rust compiled via wasm-pack to WebAssembly. The hardest part is reverse-engineering AutoLISP's proprietary entity-handling primitives (`entmake`, `ssget`, `command`) and implementing an accurate DXF/SVG CAD geometry generation engine. Needs expertise in compiler construction and AutoCAD's internal entity relationship models.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: AutoCAD with COM/.NET integration, Modern ECAD tools, ATLAST (Forth), Emacs, GIMP scripting
Concerns raised: Autodesk neglecting AutoLISP in favor of .NET, AutoLISP becoming truly obsolete in AutoCAD, Mobile browser usability issues
Feature requests: Parenthesis matching/highlighting, KiCad export (symbols + footprints), CSV import/export workflow
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 976 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #80 of 977 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 58 days after the earliest competitor.
- Octopii, a runtime for writing distributed applications in Rust · hn · 2025-12-09 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.63
- A Haskell programmable-CAD environment, in the browser with WASM · hn · 2026-07-07 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- VT Code · hn · 2026-05-30 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- CometixCode · github · 2026-09-20 · 533 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- Cargo-rail: graph-aware monorepo tooling for Rust; 11 deps · hn · 2025-12-10 · 61 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- Rusdantic · hn · 2026-03-30 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- Hybrid-Transpiler · hn · 2025-12-26 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- loom · github · 2026-09-09 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.56
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.