containers/crun

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4082 stars · 437 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

crun is a fast, lightweight OCI container runtime written entirely in C, conforming to the Open Container Initiative runtime specification. It can be used as a standalone CLI (e.g., with Podman) or embedded as a C library, offering significantly lower memory footprint and faster startup than runc.

Use cases

• run OCI containers with lower memory overhead than runc
• embed a container runtime as a C library in another program
• run containers on resource-constrained IoT or edge devices
• speed up mass container startup in CI or testing
• run WebAssembly workloads via OCI (wasm-oci)
• replace runc as the runtime backend for Podman

When to choose

• you need a faster, lower-memory OCI runtime than runc
• you want to link container runtime functionality directly into a C program
• you run containers on memory-constrained or embedded Linux systems
• you use Podman or another tool that supports pluggable OCI runtimes

When to avoid

• you need a runtime on non-Linux platforms such as Windows or macOS
• your tooling requires a Go-based runtime ecosystem or runc-specific features
• you prefer a runtime with the largest community and most third-party documentation

Facets

library · maturity active

container-runtime developer-tools cloud-computing iot c cli oci-runtime runc-alternative low-memory-footprint podman wasm-oci containers devops linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="containers/crun")