LLM inference in plain C/C++ — run capable models on everyday hardware.
llama.cpp made large language models runnable on a laptop CPU with no GPU, no framework, no cluster. The quantization formats it pioneered (GGUF) became the de facto standard for local inference.
An in-process SQL OLAP database — SQLite for analytics.
DuckDB brings columnar analytical queries into the process: no server, no setup, just fast SQL over Parquet and CSV files. It made the 'small data' analytics stack boring in the best way.