Run Conway's Game of Life in CSS
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Repository: https://github.com/el-ev/wssThis project is heavily inspired by Lyra Rebane's x86CSS (https://lyra.horse/x86css/).So I built a WebAssembly-to-CSS transpiler and spent some time optimizing its output. This is one of the programs it produced: the program runs Conway's Game of Life, store the grid in memory, then display the grid as well as buffers in the memory visualizer.The program polls the on-screen keyboard once every few cycles when it needs input, so you may need to hold a key down for a second or more for it to register.You may notice there's still a piece of JS in the page, which provides a faster and more reliable clock to the CSS runtime. Without JS, a CSS animation drives the runtime at about 1s per cycle. You can try the pure-CSS version at https://bucket.svc.moe/uploads/wss/life_nojs.html . It is slower but at a playable speed.
HN · launched Nov 3, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 86%) · 0 views
Niche: programming language compilers · 77 launches, 2 in the last 7 days ▼ -60% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 77 launches in programming language compilers →
Could you build this?
Partial The page and interactive keyboard UI are simple CSS and HTML, but the program is produced by a WebAssembly-to-CSS transpiler, which is a compiler-level piece that vibe coding alone won't reliably produce.
What it would actually take: The core is a compiler that lowers WebAssembly into pure CSS rules, using clever encodings for state and memory and optimization passes on the output. Building it requires compiler engineering knowledge, WebAssembly binary parsing, and experience with CSS's computational limits.
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Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 75 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #69 of 76 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 365 days after the earliest competitor.
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