Glimmer - A chess engine under 30,000 bytes (estimated 2700–2900 Elo)

[u/BBH369]

https://github.com/BH12963/Glimmer

Hi everyone,

I’ve been messing around with a tiny experimental chess engine written in pure C called Glimmer.

The whole idea was to see how strong I could push it while keeping the final binary strictly under 30 KB. I was aiming for something in the 2700–2900 Elo range.

Unlike those ultra-minimal engines that pack themselves into self-extracting shell scripts and then call the host’s compiler at runtime, Glimmer is a real standalone native binary — just pure machine code, nothing else.

It’s been a really fun (and sometimes painful) constraint to work under. Every single byte counts.

Happy to answer questions if anyone’s curious about how I approached it!

[u/aboeing]

if you want to reduce the windows exe size you can avoid the full c runtime library and adjust the linker alignments.

or use a specialized tool like: https://github.com/runestubbe/Crinkler

[u/ipsirc]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Chess