The goal of this project is to build a clean, fast chess engine in C that starts from a FEN string and produces fully legal moves, verified via PERFT for correctness and speed. It uses a bitboard architecture with precomputed attack caches (pawns, knights, king; sliders later) and a small, well-structured codebase that’s easy to extend. The emphasis is on correctness-first (FEN → board → legal movegen → perft), performance through cache-friendly data and simple hot paths, and portability with minimal dependencies. A lightweight Python test suite (via ctypes) checks known attack patterns and guardrails, and the design leaves room to add sliders, make/unmake, search (alpha–beta), and a UCI interface as follow-on milestones.