Poof Alternatives

poof reviews and mentions

• Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Dec 2025

  By the authors definition, I've been writing perfect software for over a decade.

  It's never required LLMs. In fact, I think the idea that "LLMs allow us to write software for ourselves" borders on missing the point, for me at least. I write software for myself because I like the exploratory process .. figuring out how do do something such that it works with as little friction as possible from the side of the user; who is of course myself, in the future.

  I like nitpicking the details, getting totally side-tracked on seemingly frivolous minutiae. Frequently enough, coming to the end of a month long yak-shave actually contributes meaningful insight to the problem at hand.

  A few of my 'perfect' projects

  https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

  https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

  https://scallywag.software

• How to write type-safe generics in C
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Nov 2025
• Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
  156 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jun 2025

  https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

  I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.

  https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

• Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
  119 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 May 2025

  I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy.

  https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

  I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.

  https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

• A basic reflection-like system for editing object fields in a C++ game engine
  5 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 23 May 2023
• Plain C API design, the real world Kobayashi Maru test
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Apr 2023

  > I use this pattern so much I actually wrote a little metaprogramming language that is capable of generating a lot of the boilerplate for you. Link in my bio, if anyone's interested in looking at it.

  Your language [0] is an interesting idea. I've done a lot of similar stuff (not at work, I'm very rarely asked to write C code professionally, but I like mucking around with it in my personal time). My own approach to C metaprogramming involves obtuse preprocessor hacks (e.g [1]) and shell scripts that use grep/awk/sed to find macro invocations and spit out new header files as a result. Maybe your way is better.

  A word of warning though – do you realise your name for your language is an anti-gay slur in several dialects of English? You might end up unintentionally upsetting some people with it.

  [0] https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

  [1] https://github.com/pfultz2/Cloak/wiki/C-Preprocessor-tricks,...

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