Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig
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HN · launched Dec 12, 2025 · 196 upvotes (top 5%) · 0 views
Niche: code execution sandboxes · 37 launches, 0 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 37 launches in code execution sandboxes →
Could you build this?
No Writing a virtual machine sandbox in C that interprets custom bytecode or an ISA (like RISC-V or WebAssembly) and supporting cross-compiled guest binaries in Rust, C, and Zig requires low-level systems programming and hardware architecture knowledge.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires a C-based emulator/runtime executing an instruction set architecture (such as RISC-V, eBPF, or custom bytecode) with memory sandboxing, register state machines, and system call traps. The hard parts include memory safety boundaries, ISA decoding and execution semantics, and developing target-specific toolchains or linkers for Rust, C, and Zig guest runtimes.
Discussion
12 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: WASM-micro-runtime (WAMR), libriscv, Wasefire, mini-rv32ima
Concerns raised: RISC-V immediates decoding slow in software vs hardware, Larger code footprint than WASM alternatives, Performance compared to embedded WASM interpreters
Feature requests: Memory-mapped IO simulation support for IoT/microcontroller driver testing
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 1647 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #92 of 1648 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 42 days after the earliest competitor.
- Zeroboot · hn · 2026-03-17 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.65
- Hosting 100 Linux dev environments on one VM using LXC · hn · 2026-01-10 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- swiftvm · github · 2026-10-10 · 170 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- ZSvirt · hn · 2026-09-02 · 72 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Neptune, a free and open-source terminal built in Rust · hn · 2026-10-07 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Node-Vmm · hn · 2026-05-04 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- wstrace · github · 2026-10-09 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- WolfStack · hn · 2026-03-08 · 32 upvotes · similarity 0.52
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