Show HN: Microcrad – Micrograd Reimplemented in C

Hey HN, I'm Orazio. I built microcrad (with a 'c'), a tiny scalar-valued automatic differentiation engine, with a small multi-layer perceptron implementation on top. It's reimplementation of Andrej Karpathy's micrograd in C. For me, this was a learning project to revisit backpropagation from first principles, with the additional difficulties that come with programming in C.

The basic idea is the same as micrograd: each number is a `Value` node in a computation graph, ops connect nodes, and the `backward` function topologically sorts the graph before applying the chain rule in reverse. The C-specific parts are memory management and two simple data structures I needed to implement backprop: sets and vectors.

The source code is about 1,350 lines, MIT licensed, and well documented. Dependencies are just the standard library and libm. In addition, the repo contains two examples to showcase how the engine works: a toy regression and an MNIST task.

What this is not: a framework to build and train neural networks in production. Being scalar-valued makes it slow, and it wasn't built for numerical robustness or large datasets. There's no commercial aim here; it's a learning project.

If you read through it, I'd like to hear thoughts, both on the ML engineering aspect and on anything that reads as un-idiomatic C.