Materialization IO fabric: matrix router and transformation implementations for coordinate spaces over physical media.
Chton lands the tagma coordinate space onto physical media. The tagma specification (syntagma) defines the coordinate space; chton provides the materialization: byte-level bindings over media, per-space-type layout strategies, and the backends that bind the tagma-map CoordMap protocol surface to origins.
The name chton comes from the Greek chthōn (earth): the layer every project stands on. The tagma space is the ideal form; chton is the ground it lands on. Memory is the native habitat of the coordinate space, so chton materializes onto media outside memory: file, signal, network, and GPU origins. The storage format is the memory layout: there is no separate serialization step. Memory is a projection surface, not a materialization target: an external medium projected into the address space is the mapped binding of that medium.
| Layer | Content |
|---|---|
| origin | byte-level bindings: Origin trait with capability matrix (address mode, direction, persistence, binding), MemoryOrigin, FileOrigin, MappedFileOrigin (mmap, unix, the mapped binding) |
| binding | per-space-type materialization strategies: SpaceStrategy trait, TreeStrategy<N> (fixed-depth tree layout, the CoordSpaceN form) |
| map | materialized key-value surface: CoordMapStore<N>, the tagma-map CoordMap/CoordMapKey contract over the binding backend |
| io | flat key-space IO surface: FileIo, BatchIo, FsIo (absorbed from nexus) |
- Addressing is per-level array indexing: depth is bounded by file size, never by integer width.
- A protocol is origin-agnostic and an origin is protocol-agnostic. Storage is an attribute of the destination: a disk origin stores by nature, a signal origin propagates by nature. The same protocol materializes over either.
- The key-value protocol surface is the tagma-map CoordMap contract, owned by tagma; chton provides the materialization backends that bind the surface to origins.
- The record boundary in the map layer is the seam for a codec layer: payload encryption before write and decryption after read change no trait surface and no slot layout.
- Per-space-type strategies keep the materialization independent of the space type: the fixed-depth tree (CoordSpaceN form) is the first strategy; DynCoordSpace and other tagma space types are later strategies on the same surface.
Early implementation. The origin, binding (tree strategy), and map
(materialized CoordMap) layers work over memory, file, and mapped-file
origins, and the io layer absorbs the flat key-space surface from nexus.
The unit test suite runs through ./run.sh. Checkpoint and restore,
wave origins, and the record codec layer are later work.
Chton contains no domain model. FIH, knowledge synthesis, and personal memory are concerns of the systems that consume chton as infrastructure (nexus, rem).
- tagma-core (github.com/ssccsorg/syntagma): the coordinate space specification
Tagma core: Apache 2.0 (open-core). Chton space IO layer and enterprise service components: commercial.