Show HN: Onetone – A full-stack framework with custom C interpreter
github.comHey HN,
I've been working on Onetone Framework for the past few years and finally releasing it as open source (AGPL 3.0).
*What is it?*
Onetone is an ambitious full-stack development framework that includes:
- Custom C interpreter with its own scripting language (.otc files)
- 27,000+ line OpenGL 3D graphics engine with PBR materials, skeletal animation, physics, and particle systems
- PHP web framework with MVC architecture
- Python utilities and tooling
- 716,000+ lines of code across 17 programming languages
*The scripting language features:*
- Classes, inheritance, generators, async/await
- Records, enums, pattern matching
- Built-in collections (ArrayList, HashMap, HashSet, TreeMap, etc.)
- Template strings, destructuring, spread operators
- Native bindings for OpenGL, Windows API, audio, networking
*Why build this?*
I run a game localization and needed a unified toolset for:
- Visual novel engines
- Translation management tools
- Quick prototyping with native performance
Instead of gluing together multiple languages and frameworks, I built one cohesive system.
*Current status:*
- Windows-focused (uses WinAPI extensively)
- Some features still in development (generators, full async support)
- Documentation is a work in progress
GitHub: https://github.com/onetoneframework/framework
Would love feedback from the community.
*Roadmap & Vision*
My goal is to evolve Onetone's scripting language to reach Python-level usability and ecosystem richness. I want developers to be able to pick it up as easily as Python while retaining native performance.
*A note on development process*
I want to be transparent: this project was developed with significant assistance from Claude (Anthropic's LLM). The codebase is a mix of hand-written code and LLM-generated code, with me directing the architecture, debugging, and integration.
I found this workflow surprisingly effective for a project of this scale – the LLM helped with boilerplate, documentation, and exploring implementation approaches, while I focused on design decisions and fixing the subtle bugs that AI still struggles with.
Whether you see this as "cheating" or the future of development, I think it's worth discussing. The 700K+ lines wouldn't exist without this collaboration, and I'm curious how others feel about AI-assisted open source projects.
There were many errors and strange bits of code produced by the LLM, and I spent a lot of time tracking down memory leaks; in fact, there isn’t a single piece of LLM-generated code that I didn’t end up modifying. I still think "vibe coding" has a number of issues.
You cut out everything from a game engine except the scripting language. Though it looks like it lacks out of the box cross platform Support. A note about your vibe coding, check out this research paper [https://youtube.com/watch?v=TJ-vWGCosdQ]. Not enough people are using it. Would love to see if it can reduce the bugs you encountered.
Yes — the ultimate goal is to develop an interpreter that includes a complete game engine, so it might look that way. I have seven years of programming experience, so I can both write and read code; I verified the LLM-generated code and fixed bugs by comparing it with code on GitHub. I actually wrote most of the PHP side myself. I appreciate the suggestion and will try the method you mentioned, but I found it faster to read the code myself to find and fix errors directly (the shader parts couldn’t be solved by the LLM, so I’m studying tutorials and implementing them by hand). I think that for people who didn’t major in programming, it’s still probably difficult to have an LLM produce even basic working programs.