AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Llm.f90 fast, hackable transformer implementation in Fortran

I submitted an earlier version of this a few months ago (as llama2.f90). At that time it had a lot of steps to run and was just a toy, now it's easy to run and is a competitive option for llm inference. See the motivation section for discussion and the `Performance` issue for an ongoing discussion about performance.

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Llm.f90 fast, hackable transformer implementation in Fortran launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1
Speeding up LLM inference 2x times (possibly)▲419
Here's a project I've been working on for the last few months. It's a new (I think) algorithm, that allows to adjust smoothly - and in real time - how many calculations you'd like to do during inference of an LLM model. It seems that it's possible to do just 20-25% of weight multiplications instead of all of them, and still get good inference results. I implemented it to run on M1/M2/M3 GPU. The mmul approximation itself can be pushed to run 2x fast before the quality of output collapses. The inference speed is just a bit faster than Llama.cpp's, because the rest of implementation…
2024 · asciinema.org · its alternatives →
2
I've built a locally running Perplexity clonefree▲669
The video demo runs a 7b Model on a normal gaming GPU. I think it already works quite well (accounting for the limited hardware power). :)
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
3
Llama 3.2 Interpretability with Sparse Autoencoders▲579
I spent a lot of time and money on this rather big side project of mine that attempts to replicate the mechanistic interpretability research on proprietary LLMs that was quite popular this year and produced great research papers by Anthropic [1], OpenAI [2] and Deepmind [3]. I am quite proud of this project and since I consider myself the target audience for HackerNews did I think that maybe some of you would appreciate this open research replication as well. Happy to answer any questions or face any feedback. Cheers [1]…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
4
Llama 3.1 70B on a single RTX 3090 via NVMe-to-GPU bypassing the CPU▲395
Hi everyone, I'm kinda involved in some retrogaming and with some experiments I ran into the following question: "It would be possible to run transformer models bypassing the cpu/ram, connecting the gpu to the nvme?" This is the result of that question itself and some weekend vibecoding (it has the linked library repository in the readme as well), it seems to work, even on consumer gpus, it should work better on professional ones tho
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
5
Find the best local LLM for your hardware, ranked by benchmarks▲283
Find the local LLM that actually runs and performs best on your hardware. Ranked by real, recency-aware benchmarks, not parameter count. One command, run it instantly. - Andyyyy64/whichllm
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
6
We made our own inference engine for Apple Silicon▲186
We wrote our inference engine on Rust, it is faster than llama cpp in all of the use cases. Your feedback is very welcomed. Written from scratch with idea that you can add support of any kernel and platform.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
7
TensorZero▲307
Hi HN! We're Gabriel & Viraj, and we're excited to open source TensorZero. To be a little cheeky, TensorZero is an open-source platform that helps LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products. 1. Integrate our model gateway 2. Send metrics or feedback 3. Unlock compounding improvements in quality, cost, and latency It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying: • Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead • Observability: inference & feedback → your database • Optimization: better prompts, models, inference strategies • Experimentation:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
8
Tiny-vLLM – high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA▲205
Build your own high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA - a smaller version of vLLM - jmaczan/tiny-vllm
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
9
LLM Verified with Monte Carlo Tree Search▲102
This is a weekend hack that I'd like to further develop as it's working surprisingly well. Using MCTS, we can explore a space of possible verified programs with an LLM. We check the partial programs at each step, and so steer towards programs that pass the verifier. https://github.com/namin/llm-verified-with-monte-carlo-tree-...
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
10
Wafer Pass▲116
Hi HN, I’m Emilio. We’re launching the Wafer extension for the popular IDEs (VS Code, Cursor and Antigravity). Wafer exists to make performance engineers more efficient. Most of the work perf engs do is extracting signal and turning it into the next experiment. You spend hours per kernel doing interpretation and bookkeeping: which counters matter, what changed, what hypothesis you’re testing, what to try next. Wafer is building an environment where profiling, compiler analysis, and docs are first-class context in your workflow, so iteration is cheap. long-term, that same structured context…
Apr 2026 · wafer.ai · its alternatives →
11
LLM, a Rust Crate/CLI for CPU Inference of LLMs (LLaMA, GPT-NeoX, etc.)▲45
G'day, HN! I'm one of the maintainers of `llm`. I've been working alongside a trusty group of contributors to bring this project to life, and we're now at a point where we're ready to share it with the world. Large language models (LLMs) are taking the computing world by storm due to their emergent abilities that allow them to perform a wide variety of tasks, including translation, summarization, code generation, and even some degree of reasoning. However, the ecosystem around LLMs is still in its infancy, and it can be difficult to get started with these models. `llm` is a one-stop shop for…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
12AT
A tiny LLM running at 21,000 tok/s on a $250 FPGA (Live Demo)▲79
A 3.16M-parameter INT4 transformer running entirely in the on-chip memory of a Xilinx Kria KV260. Zero DRAM in the token loop, 59,965 tok/s on the fabric, bit-exact. Chat with it live.
Aug 2026 · mikeayles.com · its alternatives →
13
TurboPilot: Copilot clone runs code completion LLM on your CPU▲37
Hi HN, I spent my easter weekend stuck in the house with COVID and I decided to play with llama.cpp [1] and fauxpilot [2] to see if I could get LLM code assist working on pure CPU. As a proof of concept I'd say I've proven that it's possible. However there's still a lot to do. The auto complete is quite slow at the moment. PRs welcome. [1] https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp [2] https://github.com/fauxpilot/fauxpilot
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
14
ChainFactory – Run Structured LLM Inference with Easy Parallelism▲8
hi everyone. how does moving llm call prompts and output structure definitions away from code into configuration land sound? would you use something like this if it was stable and well documented enough? please don't hold back the criticism. i appreciate all feedback (constructive & otherwise).
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
15
Building an LLM from Scratch in TypeScript▲33
The from-scratch guide to building large language models in NodeJS.
9d ago · book.humanexperiences.io · its alternatives →
16
KTransformers–236B Model and 1M Context LLM Inference on Local Machines▲20
Hey Hacker News! We are excited to share our open-source project, KTransformers, a flexible framework designed for cutting-edge LLM inference optimizations! Leveraging state-of-the-art kernels from llamafile and marlin, KTransformers seamlessly enhances the performance of HuggingFace Transformers, making it possible to operate large 236B MoE models or extremely long 1M context locally with promising speed. KTransformers is a Python-centric framework designed with extensibility at its core. By implementing and injecting an optimized module with a single line of code, users gain access to a…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
17
Composable middleware for LLM inference Optimization Passes▲7
Hey HN, I've been building AutoAgents, an AI agent framework in Rust. Today I'm sharing a feature I haven't seen done well elsewhere: composable middleware layers for LLM inference pipelines. The problem Every agent framework lets you swap LLM providers. Almost none of them give you a structured way to enforce safety, caching, or data sanitization in the inference path itself. You end up with guardrails as application-level if-statements, caching bolted on as a separate service, and PII handling as a "we'll add it later" TODO that never ships. This gets worse with local models. Cloud APIs…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
18
Llmtop – Htop for LLM Inference Clusters (vLLM, SGLang, Ollama, llama)▲5
I work on inference scheduling — KV cache-aware routing, load balancing across GPU workers, that kind of thing. I wanted something like k9s but for my inference stack. Nothing existed, so I built it. llmtop is a real-time terminal dashboard for LLM inference workers. It scrapes the Prometheus /metrics endpoints that vLLM, SGLang, and LMCache already expose and shows everything in one view: KV cache usage, queue depth, TTFT/ITL latencies (P50/P99 from histogram buckets), token throughput, prefix cache hit rates. Color-coded — red means go fix it. ``` brew install…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
19
Free Inference Engineer and Model Training Roadmap▲16
Free, gamified roadmaps for LLM engineering: an Inference Engineering path (KV caches, CUDA kernels, production vLLM serving) and a Model Training path (pretraining on a budget, scaling laws, SFT/DPO/GRPO) — 185 tasks with auto-verified milestones instead of a paper certificate.
Aug 2026 · inferquest.org · its alternatives →
20
An educational Local Qwen3 LLM Inference project written in Rust▲15
An educational Rust project for exporting and running inference on Qwen3 LLM family - reinterpretcat/qwen3-rs
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
21
We built the Keras of LLMs▲5
Here is a production-first Keras-inspired LM framework, built with the advice of François Chollet (ex-Google, creator of Keras and ARC-AGI), our technical advisor. This system have already been deployed in production with our clients (which is why we have already every LLMOps practice implemented). It is also compatible with Jupyter and Marimo to integrate seamlessly in you Data Scientists workflows. You can try the code examples online on HF space and you can find more information in the documentation and FAQ. If you have any feedback for us don't hesitate to join our discord! More releases…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
22
Lightweight Llama3 Inference Engine – CUDA C▲12
Hey, recently I took inspiration from llama.cpp, ollama, and many other similar tools that enable inference of LLMs locally, and I just finished building a Llama inference engine for the 8B model in CUDA C. I recently wanted to explore my newly founded interest in CUDA programming and my passion for machine learning. This project only makes use of the native CUDA runtime api and cuda_fp16. The inference takes place in fp16, so it requires around 17-18GB of VRAM (~16GB for model params and some more for intermediary caches). It doesn’t use cuBLAS or any similar libraries since I wanted to be…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
23
Trim Transformer: A transformer for physics models▲10
Trim is building a foundation model for physics. We found almost all well-maintained transformer-based architectures are optimized for language models. We’re releasing our own open-source transformer package that is optimized for physics. It achieves a 90% reduction in memory usage and a 3.5x speedup in a standard Navier-Stokes dataset.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
24
Curated Transformers – PyTorch LLMs with less code duplication▲10
🤖 A PyTorch library of curated Transformer models and their composable components - explosion/curated-transformers
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →