I wrote a DOOM clone in my own programming language
Details
- External ID
- 47932974
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I wrote a DOOM clone in my own programming language
- Website domain
- spectrelang.org
- Launched
- April 28, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 34
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8046272493573264
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- doom clone in custom programming language
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Designing and implementing a custom programming language compiler/interpreter from scratch and using it to develop a pseudo-3D raycasting game engine requires deep compiler construction and graphics programming expertise.
What it would actually take: Building this requires writing a lexer, parser, abstract syntax tree (AST), type checker, and bytecode virtual machine or LLVM backend for a custom language, plus standard library runtime support. Additionally, it requires implementing a BSP/raycasting rendering engine, game state loops, and hardware drawing bindings in the custom language.
Discussion
18 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Wolfenstein 3D, Hovertank 3D, lodev.org raycasting tutorial
Concerns raised: Lacks textured walls like original DOOM, Misleading to call it DOOM clone when using Wolfenstein 3D raycasting techniques, Creator being defensive/passive aggressive in responses
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 202 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #45 of 203 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 172 days after the earliest competitor.
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- doom-os · github · 2026-09-28 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- N64DoomRPGPort · github · 2026-09-10 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- I made a "programming language" looking for feedback · hn · 2026-03-29 · 38 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Doomersion - Learn Languages by Doomscrolling · yc · 2026-03-09 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- I help founders kill doom scrolling and hook people's attention fast · hn · 2026-05-27 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- I built a RISC-V emulator that runs DOOM · hn · 2026-05-03 · 50 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- doom_epub · github · 2026-09-12 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.49
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.