Try Gerbil Scheme in the Browser
Details
- External ID
- 47394356
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Try Gerbil Scheme in the Browser
- Website domain
- trygerbil.dev
- Launched
- March 16, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 9
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5393603936039361
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Gerbil is a Scheme built on Gambit that compiles to native code via C. It has an actor-oriented concurrency model, a rich module system, and a batteries- included stdlib. I built a browser playground to make it easy to try without installing anything.Briefly: - A real REPL with state that persists between expressions - 10 guided examples from basic Scheme through pattern matching, hash tables, higher-order functions, and actors (but, do go to https://cons.io for the full docs) - A scratchpad for multi-line code that evaluates into the live REPL session - Snippet sharing via short URLsTo keep this short, some implementation details here: https://abacusnoir.com/2026/03/15/a-playground-for-gerbil-sc...(Does have limitations in this early version, see the post for details on those too)
Enrichment
- Theme
- Claude integrations and coding agents
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- gerbil scheme browser playground
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Compiling a complete Scheme dialect like Gerbil (built on Gambit and emitting C) into WebAssembly with an active persistent REPL requires deep compiler toolchain and Emscripten porting expertise.
What it would actually take: Building this requires cross-compiling the Gambit Scheme runtime and the Gerbil compiler/runtime to WebAssembly via Emscripten or LLVM backend targeting Wasm. The in-browser REPL requires implementing a virtualized POSIX environment in the browser to handle stdio, dynamic module loading, and persistent memory state across evaluations. This necessitates specialized knowledge of Scheme runtimes, C FFI, and WebAssembly compilation toolchains.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 27 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #13 of 28 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 125 days after the earliest competitor.
- Scheme-langserver · hn · 2026-02-24 · 52 upvotes · similarity 0.42
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- goboscript · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
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- GWZ · hn · 2026-07-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.33
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- Gambit, an open-source agent harness for building reliable AI agents · hn · 2026-01-16 · 91 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- Gerbergpt · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.33
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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