*this is incorrect per the author’s response, my apologies.

For instance, it goes into (nano)vLLM internals and doesn’t mention PagedAttention once (one of the core ideas that vLLM is based on)[1].

Also mentions that Part 2 will cover dense vs MoE’s, which is weird because nanovllm hardcodes a dense Qwen3 into the source.

Here are better (imo) explainers about how vLLM works:

- https://hamzaelshafie.bearblog.dev/paged-attention-from-firs...

- https://www.aleksagordic.com/blog/vllm

- https://huggingface.co/blog/continuous_batching

Aleksa’s blog is a bit in the weeds for my taste but it’s really worth working through.

A lot of the magic of vLLM happens in the PagedAttention kernels, which are really succinctly implanted in nanovllm. And the codebase is great and readable by itself!

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1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.06180

https://www.neutree.ai/blog/nano-vllm-part-2