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Cactus

Cactus is a C++ AI inference engine and runtime for mobile devices and wearables, combining OpenAI-compatible APIs for text, speech and vision with a computation graph, CPU/GPU kernels and rotation-based quantization.

Explore the practical guide ↓

Independent OpenViST project profile, based on linked sources.

Cactus — OpenViST project profile in AI Infrastructure & Serving.
OpenViST project illustration. See the linked sources for product details.
Understand the project

Practical overview

When it fits

Use Cactus when building or evaluating AI inference on mobile or edge hardware and you need a runtime, quantization and device-oriented kernels rather than a finished end-user app.

Who it is for

  • Developers building AI applications for mobile devices or wearables.
  • Teams evaluating on-device text, speech or vision inference.
  • Engineers integrating an inference runtime and device-oriented kernels into an edge AI project.

Documented uses

  • Run text generation, speech processing or vision inference through OpenAI-compatible APIs.
  • Use a C API to initialize a model and request chat completion.
  • Explore graph operations such as matrix multiplication, transpose and execution.
  • Download selected models or convert Hugging Face models for use with the runtime.
Before you choose

Requirements & limits

  • The repository identifies C++ as its primary language and documents iOS and Android as target platforms.
  • The README gives a Homebrew-based Mac quick demo and includes a C API completion example.
  • Liquid, Gemma, Whisper, Parakeet and Qwen families are described as especially tested; conversion of other Hugging Face models is labeled experimental.
  • Published benchmark figures use named devices, models and workloads, so results depend on the selected setup.
  • The repository describes the engine as hybrid edge-cloud and includes a cloud-handoff indicator in its example response.

Check current requirements in the official documentation. Source-based guidance does not mean OpenViST has run or independently tested this project.

Source-based practical guide

Install the Mac demo and start Cactus

Install the documented command-line package on a Mac and launch Cactus.

Before you start

  • A Mac
  • Homebrew

Steps

  1. Install Cactus with brew install cactus-compute/cactus/cactus.

  2. Run cactus run.

Expected outcome

The repository's documented quick demo launches through the Cactus command-line tool.

Guide limitations

  • The quick-demo instructions do not specify a model name or further configuration.
Documentation 1 ↗
Evidence and transparency

Sources & review

Official repository ↗
Source record details
Source availability
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Sources checked
15 October 2026
Original website title
cactus-compute/cactus · Official homepage title · retained in its source language
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