Embryo Systems

Embryo Systems

Rebuilding François Bouillé’s HBDS system from the original 1995 course notes. In Rust.

In the 1990s the L.I.S.T., a laboratory at Jussieu, taught one complete computing system designed by its director: a data model, a language, a storage layer and an inference engine, all built on the same six abstract data types. Almost nothing of it survives online.

I still have the course notes. This project uses them as the source to build the system again, with large language models as a pair for the transcription and the code, and every decision traced back to a page.

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Status

Source
The 1995 polycopié is in hand and scanned.
Scan
Done: 165 pages at 320 dpi, with an OCR text layer. Whether it can be published depends on its copyright status, under review.
Code
Not started. Rust.
Site
Being written. Historical pages are drafts.

An earlier attempt, 2007-2011, in C then Erlang, written from memory, lives on as orange.

Roadmap

  1. Scan the polycopié at archival resolution.
  2. Transcribe it, text and diagrams, with LLM help, checked against the page.
  3. Write the HBDS core in Rust: the abstract data types, the hypergraph, the skeleton. Tests from the polycopié’s own examples.
  4. Rebuild the layers worth rebuilding. The ADT engine, without question. Not every subsystem: SFSI, the polycopié’s file system, is a job a database does today. Each choice gets written down.
  5. Document where the code departs from the text.