I’ve spent the last few days building Ferrox, a pure-Rust inference engine for running open LLMs locally — dense models and Mixture-of-Experts, on CPU, Apple Metal, or CUDA. No bindings to llama.cpp or ggml, no wrapping an existing runtime. Every kernel, every loader, every scheduling decision written from scratch.

The obvious question is “why, when llama.cpp already exists and is excellent.” The honest answer: I wanted to understand inference at a level deeper than “run the binary,” and I wanted a project where every performance claim had to be earned against a real, well-known baseline rather than asserted.

The entire internet is becoming slop and it’s only getting worse

The only reason why this exists:

   It is 'written in Rust™' (thanks to Claude)

At this point all vibe coded projects are an attack vector and should be avoided.

There's simply no way to easily tell by traditional means if they were made by a curious amateur or a malicious acter.

Wonderful... I'm so happy to see a Rust version of llama.cpp.

The true value of this will be proven over time with wide use and as PRs are merged.

Do you have a feel if you'll try to drive this to stay feature parity with llama.cpp, or are you willing to diverge with new features like NVME/SSD MoE weight streaming etc.

I was looking for this and to even build something like this in order to have a pure Rust stack for my backend, as well as embed local inference on edge like on mobile, but llama.cpp is just too far advanced to catch up, it seems. There are some but I'm not sure how good they are.

Looks cool! Look at the performance!

Obsolete: it should be a binary specification with various implementations, even assembly.