Developers looking to gain a better understanding of machine learning inference on local hardware can fire up a new llama engine.

Software developer Leonardo Russo has released llama3pure, which incorporates three standalone inference engines. There's a pure C implementation for desktops, a pure JavaScript implementation for Node.js, and a pure JavaScript version for web browsers that don't require WebAssembly.

"All versions are compatible with the Llama and Gemma architectures," Russo explained to The Register in an email. "The goal is to provide a dependency-free, isolated alternative in both C and JavaScript capable of reading GGUF files and processing prompts."

GGUF stands for GPT-Generated Unified Format; it is a common format for distributing machine learning models.

Llama3pure is not intended as a replacement for llama.cpp, a widely used inference engine for running local models that's significantly faster at responding to prompts. Llama3pure is an educational tool.