frink-inference 0.52.0

Pure-Rust GGUF / MoE inference engine: mmap loaders, quantized CPU + Metal + CUDA kernels
Documentation

frink-inference

Facade crate for Frink, a pure-Rust GGUF / MoE inference engine: mmap loaders, quantized CPU + Apple Metal + CUDA kernels, and an OpenAI-compatible server.

It contains no logic. It re-exports the workspace under one name, so a dependent writes one line instead of six, and so the project is findable on crates.io, since the name frink belongs to an unrelated crate.

[dependencies]
frink-inference = "0.52"

use frink_inference::gguf::ShardedGguf;

let file = ShardedGguf::open("model.gguf")?;

The binaries are elsewhere

cargo install frink-cli      # installs the `frink` binary
cargo install frink-server   # OpenAI-compatible HTTP server

They are not shipped from this crate on purpose: two crates installing a binary called frink would fight over the same path in ~/.cargo/bin.

Features

Feature Effect
metal Apple Metal kernels. Apple Silicon only.
cuda CUDA/NVRTC kernels. Builds without a CUDA toolkit; the driver and NVRTC libraries are loaded at run time.
api Re-export frink-api (route constants + wire DTOs).

Neither GPU feature is on by default. metal does not build off Apple Silicon. cuda compiles anywhere, because cudarc opens the driver and NVRTC with dlopen, but it only runs on a machine with an NVIDIA GPU and driver.

CUDA timings against llama.cpp are published for an RTX 3090 and an RTX 3060 in benchmarks/RESULTS.md, measured on rented hosts. See docs/FEATURES.md for what the CUDA backend covers.

The rest of the workspace

Crate What it is
frink-gguf GGUF mmap reader, sharded checkpoints
frink-quant Block layouts, fused dequant+dot
frink-safetensors SafeTensors mmap reader
frink-core Tensor ops, RoPE, GQA, KV cache, MoE expert residency
frink-moe Expert routing and dispatch
frink-models Loaders and decoder stacks
frink-api Route constants + wire DTOs
frink-metal Apple Metal kernels
frink-cuda CUDA/NVRTC kernels
frink-vulkan Early Vulkan backend: one Q8_0 compute shader, end to end

The serving policy (prefix cache, scheduler, output parsers) lives in frink-server's policy module. It was a crate of its own, frink-edge, which has been dissolved into frink-core and frink-server.

Speed claims live in benchmarks/RESULTS.md, measured against llama.cpp on the same host and the same GGUF. That table is generated from the raw timing files each run writes, and it says so wherever nothing has been measured.

Apache-2.0.