Crazierl
An Erlang Operating System
Details
- External ID
- 47567049
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Crazierl
- Website domain
- crazierl.org
- Launched
- March 29, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 72
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8788437884378844
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Crazierl is an experimental/hobby operating system based around BEAM.I've linked the browser based demo; I don’t recommend using a phone; it does work, slowly, on the phones I tested, but it’s very awkward to use. You can share a link with a hashtag with your friends and click the consent checkbox, and it (should) link up into dist and I’ve also included a chat application you can start with chat:start(). (quit chat with /quit, or use the shell menu with ctrl-g to switch between shells etc).The browser demo relies on the v86 javascript x86 virtual machine. You can also run Crazierl on a real x86 system, but I’ve had mixed luck on modern systems, it uses some esoteric legacy VGA features and support for that isn’t getting better.Crazierl is fairly limited: 32-bit x86, BIOS boot, only two NIC drivers virtio-net and realtek 8168. But it's got enough to become part of an Erlang dist cluster. It also supports SMP, but it’s crashy with high core counts in qemu; there’s almost certainly several concurrency bugs in the kernel. There's also a lot of excess tcp debug spew (sorry).Source code is available (Apache) https://github.com/russor/crazierl/
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- erlang operating system
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building an operating system kernel based around the BEAM Erlang virtual machine and compiling it to boot on x86 hardware/emulators requires low-level kernel development and runtime porting expertise.
What it would actually take: Creating an Erlang OS entails writing bare-metal bootloaders and x86 hardware initialization (interrupt handling, paging, memory management) in C or Assembly, followed by porting the entire Erlang runtime system (ERTS) to run without a host POSIX OS (unikernel architecture). It requires deep knowledge of x86 architecture, the BEAM internal C runtime, and virtual networking via WebSocket proxies.
Discussion
14 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Hydros (Erlang OS with IO-APIC and NIF support), DragonFlyBSD (lightweight kernel threads with message passing), v86 (JavaScript/WebAssembly virtual PC)
Concerns raised: Memory management implementation quality not finalized, Hydros project website no longer available, Browser-based demo performance/feasibility questions
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 48 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #10 of 49 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 124 days after the earliest competitor.
- Xlerb · hn · 2025-11-29 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- E80: an 8-bit CPU in structural VHDL · hn · 2026-01-17 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- 2B0X virtuall machine · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Microterm runs Linux VM in any browser tab via WASM, RISCV64 emulation · hn · 2026-02-22 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Lightweight Task queue on Erlang/OTP, SQLite-backed, no overengineering · hn · 2026-06-10 · 75 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Hyper · hn · 2026-07-09 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- A WebGPU-based browser engine with "Blam "-style physics · hn · 2026-01-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- An extensible pub/sub messaging server for edge applications · hn · 2026-01-28 · 44 upvotes · similarity 0.36
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.