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> It proves that modern LLMs can run without Python, PyTorch, or GPUs.

Did we need any proof of that ?

Python and PyTorch all call out to C libraries… I don’t get what he means by “proving LLMs can run without Python and PyTorch” at all. Seems like they don’t understand basic fundamentals about things here…
A bizarre claim like that would be what happens when you let an LLM write the README without reading it first.
My first implementation of gemma.cpp was kind of like this.

There's such a massive performance differential vs. SIMD though that I learned to appreciate SIMD (via highway) as one sweet spot of low-dependency portability that sits between C loops and the messy world of GPUs + their fat tree of dependencies.

If anyone want to learn the basics - whip out your favorite LLM pair programmer and ask it to help you study the kernels in the ops/ library of gemma.cpp:

https://github.com/google/gemma.cpp/tree/main/ops

but why tho? next gemma is coming and no one uses gemma 3 in prod anyway.
I'm really charmed by this project (I know there are a few like it).

In particular it's got a single ~600 line file (https://github.com/robitec97/gemma3.c/blob/main/gemma3_kerne...) with a clear straightforward implementation of every major function used in inferencing (google's models) from gelu to rope.

I'm curious how many more functions you'd need to add to have full coverage of every publically available LLM innovation (e.g. QK-Norm from Qwen3, SwiGLU etc.).

Obviously llama.cpp has a much bigger library but it's lovely to see everything in one clean file.

Anyone using this model for something useful? For now I only have use cases for top performing models...