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Life & fun · May 14, 2026

Nibble

An attempt at a single pass LLVM frontend in ~3000 lines of C without external dependencies, malloc, or an AST. Included are some graphical examples. The IR isn't perfect, and the README touches on one particular downfall

Nibble launched on May 14, 2026 with 102 votes, #308 of 20,538 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.

Visit github.com ↗Nibble alternativestop 1% of May 2026

In plain words

Nibble is a compact LLVM frontend written in approximately 3000 lines of C that operates in a single pass without external dependencies, memory allocation, or an abstract syntax tree. Designed for developers interested in compiler construction, it demonstrates an alternative approach to traditional compiler design. The project includes graphical examples to illustrate its functionality, though the generated intermediate representation has known limitations that are documented in the accompanying README.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Generating LLVM IR without malloc or external dependencies - GitHub - glouw/nibble: Generating LLVM IR without malloc or external dependencies

Nibble was written in 3000 lines of C to demonstrate an approach to LLVM IR generation without relying on external dependencies or heap allocations. Nibble supports defer, recursion, integer, floating, and boolean types, structs (simply named types), GLSL-like struct operators, pointers, function pointers, branching, loops, type checking, basic C interoperability via generic pointers, and reasonable error messages. Included are these four graphical demos demonstrating Nibble's ability. To try them out, ensure SDL2 is first installed, as well as Clang, and then run make . Clang will compile main.c and output the nibble compiler, and nibble will then compile and run the graphical demos. Of…from github.com

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