May 13, 2026
Small language, big comment energy
Show HN: Nibble
Tiny DIY coding language drops, and the comments instantly split between awe, confusion, and logo thirst
TLDR: Nibble is a tiny homemade programming language that can already run graphics demos, which made commenters seriously impressed by how much was packed into so little code. But the real buzz was the mix of praise, confusion over the name and missing explanations, and even a side debate about the animated project page.
A tiny new programming language called Nibble just rolled into Show HN with a very brag-worthy pitch: it was built in about 3,000 lines of C, avoids extra add-ons, skips dynamic memory grabs, and still manages to run flashy graphics demos. For non-programmers: this is basically someone showing up with a homemade sports car built in a small garage and saying, "Yes, it also drifts." And the crowd? Immediately loud.
The strongest reaction was straight-up admiration. One commenter called the whole thing "honestly pretty impressive," especially because it was made so compactly and without some of the usual scaffolding. That set the tone: a lot of people seemed genuinely wowed by the sheer ambition and neatness of the project. But this is the internet, so applause was never going to be the only genre.
Very quickly, the comments turned into a mix of mystery, nitpicking, and comedy. One person demanded to know what "Nibble" even means — is it a snake reference, a half-byte joke, both, neither? Another praised the logo with the kind of intensity usually reserved for album art, saying it "tickles my brain." Then came the practical pushback: one reader wanted way more explanation about how the language actually works, especially around the word "defer" and memory handling, while another raised an accessibility flag over animated text in the readme. The result is peak Show HN energy: part standing ovation, part confused book club, part design review, and somehow all of that makes Nibble feel more alive.
Key Points
- •Nibble is a C-like systems programming language implemented in about 3,000 lines of C.
- •The project is intended to demonstrate LLVM IR generation without external dependencies or heap allocations.
- •Nibble supports features including defer, recursion, multiple primitive types, structs, pointers, function pointers, control flow, type checking, and basic C interoperability.
- •The repository includes four graphical demos, built using Clang and run with SDL2, including multithreaded shader-style demos, a red-black tree demo, and a game programming setup demo.
- •Nibble uses a single-pass, top-down compilation approach with liberal alloca usage, which simplifies the front end but can cause stack overflows under some Clang optimization levels.