HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
SimulaVR
Simula
Haskell2017–2025
SimulaVR / Simula

Simula

Linux VR Desktop

Systems & InfrastructureMobile & Desktop
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
31Distinct people
76Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
3.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Linux VR Desktop

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

Yes, Simula allows for you to retain full control of window management with only a keyboard; mouse and hand gestures are not necessarily needed, though will be supported also.…

georgewsinger used a recommendation phrase. 3 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year76 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-09-23 11:10:43 UTC to 2025-04-13 13:08:34 UTC.

051015202017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 2 submissions, 11 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 1 submissions, 14 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 1 submissions, 8 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 19 mentions; 1 submissions, 18 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13211
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15114
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC918
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC19118
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

13 sources
georgewsinger·Dec 4, 2017
We're using Haskell to create the world's first VR Linux Distro: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula The long-term goal is to run Linux on standalone VR headsets. Right now we have something working with the HTC Vive. The Window Manager is being written in Haskell (with lots of C/C++ FFI). It's a very serious project, attempting to do something with Haskell that isn't merely useful for more programming.
In Reflecting on Haskell in 2017
georgewsinger·Oct 31, 2017
I'd like to argue something contrarian in this thread: you could be on the right path. Some facts to keep in mind: - There are on the order of 20,000 new startups each year; most of the other people in this thread are from this pool. - Only 2-5 of those 20,000 startups will end up mattering (i.e., will reach a high enough valuation/impact on the world to move a needle). - Of these 2-5 startups that matter per year, almost none of them were pivots (Twitter is LoudCloud are the only examples I can think of). - The conventional wisdom is to take an incremental idea and run with it; "ideas don't matter and execution is everything"; run sprints and use the Lean Startup methodology to pull the market out of an idea (or pivot), and reach a local maxima. - This will only get you the result that 20,000 startups a year typically get: incrementalism
Read the rest
, small victories, and/or failure. - There's also lottery ticket mentality to this conventional style of thinking: you're no different than anyone else, so stop ideating and start doing, and maybe you'll get lucky. If you've been at it for a year and haven't found anything good enough to give your life to, it could mean you are different than the average HNer. It could mean you have a calling to think bigger than most people do. Here is some material you may be interested in which bolsters this viewpoint: - Alan Kay's "The Future Doesn't Have to be Incremental": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o&t=1830s - Peter Thiel's book Zero to One. Among other things, this book discusses the importance of avoiding competition and commoditized markets (unless you have something 10x better; i.e., Google's Page Rank). - Listen to interviews with Elon Musk, who claims he started by thinking about HUGE problems that humanity faces and worked backwards. Instead of thinking incrementally, Musk thinks extremely large and seems to plan for years in advance: https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j... At some point, of course, you have to interact with reality, and that could involve interacting with negative people on HN (and especially real customers, etc). When Reid Hoffman started LinkedIn, he talked with dozens of people in his network and more than 2/3 said negative things about his idea. It's part of the process of getting calibrated with reality. But this shouldn't be your starting point; it should be what you do after you find something that actually moves you. Finally, I want to say that me and a friend were in a similar boat to you and your friends several months ago: we had been reading about technologies and problems for months and had rejected incremental ideas that didn't move us. It looked like we had just fucked around for several months and had nothing to show for it. We ended up working on a experimental VR Window Manager as an attempt to bring Linux to a new computing platform (i.e., VR): https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula Here was our rationale for this idea when we started: https://gist.github.com/georgewsinger/46ea8d6b16fb8bf3249358... It's very much in the spirit of the advice I just gave you. Lord knows we could be wrong, but one problem we don't have is in doubting whether our project could matter if we pulled it off. Good luck.
In Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea
georgewsinger·Oct 15, 2017
We used Nix to vastly simplify the build process of Simula: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula Simula is a bleeding edge VR Desktop project for Linux; virtually all of its dependencies are highly novel and require building from source for almost any distro. Nix allowed us to reduce the effort to building our project from 1hr of sifting through build documentation to a single build command. Nix's only issue is that it so far can't handle OpenGL dependencies very well. I'm not sure if this is something in principle it cannot handle, or if it just hasn't been done yet. I'm praying it's the latter.
In What is Nix and why you should try it

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.