diyC

Judgement

What it is

List, course or other material

What it does

An educational container runtime in a single C file of about 500 lines, showing namespaces, cgroups and overlayfs and how a container is created from an image.

Adopt it when

You are learning or teaching how Linux containers work underneath Docker.

Watch out

Deliberately incomplete and unmaintained since 2021.

Ready for

Experimental

Runs as

Command line

Built with

C

How established

Established: started 9 years ago, no tagged release yet.

What the license allows

Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.

Judged on 2026-11-06 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: diyC → GCC → LLVM project → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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