0-Bytes OS

An operating system in which every file is empty.

All information lives in file names, directory hierarchy, file existence, and modification times. The filesystem is the computer. Every touch is a CPU instruction, every rm a deallocation, every mv a data transform, every mkdir a memory allocation.

A small Rust engine named Pith watches the filesystem, interprets it as a living system, and exposes it to any program in any language.

find src -type f -size +0c | wc -l
# 0

This is not infrastructure. It is a conceptual piece: an inquiry into how small a computational substrate can be, built seriously enough to actually run.

The idea

Four primitives are the entire instruction set. There is no other way to change state.

Command	OS semantic
touch	Assert / Signal / Allocate a bit
rm	Retract / Deallocate / Negate
mv	Transform / Rename / Reassign
mkdir	Allocate a scope / Open a namespace

Four carriers hold all information:

• Existence — a file being there states a truth; its absence denies it
• Name — the value itself (blue, anxiety, 001)
• Position — the path qualifies the value, like grammar qualifies a word
• mtime — a free numeric register per file; a future mtime is a scheduled event

Node classes

Every filesystem entry is classified by how its name begins:

blue → data node (the name IS the value)
-expected → instruction node (- is a logic door: "state pointer")
€$price → pointer node (€ escapes: literal "$price", not a schema)

Logic doors are reserved characters that act as transformation functions. The alphabet is self-describing: the engine reads src/hard/reserved/ at boot. Add a file, extend the language. Only € (the escape) is hardcoded — the axiom.

Char	Name	Char	Name	Char	Name
€	Escape	$	Schema	-	State
!	Signal	#	Channel	§	Permission
~	Number	@	Dict key	:	Binding
[]	Array	{}	Object	()	Raw value
∞	Loop	λ	Lambda	∴	Therefore

(38 doors in total — see docs/RESERVED_VALUES.md.)

The path as a sentence

A path reads left to right, like a sentence:

src/hard/identities/001/-expected/type/identity
│ │ │ │ │ │
scope scope slot state: scope leaf
expected

"In the hard system, identities, slot 001, at the expected state, of type identity."

Directories are scopes — they qualify and group. Leaf files are assertions — their existence states a truth.

Filesystem layout

src/
├── hard/ # ROM — immutable system definitions
│ ├── reserved/ # 38 logic-door files (the alphabet)
│ ├── identities/ # identity slots
│ ├── groups/ # permission groups
│ └── types/ # type definitions
├── states/ # global state machine
├── jobs/ # task queue (pending → running → completed)
├── workers/ # worker pool
├── channels/ # IPC message queues (#system, #errors)
├── events/ # fire-and-forget signals (!boot, !shutdown, ...)
├── programs/ # installed programs — state machines as directory trees
├── databases/ # semantic data in path hierarchies
├── pointers/ # reference tables (65,536 Unicode code points)
├── schedules/ # scheduled tasks (mtime = next firing)
├── sessions/ # active API sessions
├── subscriptions/ # per-identity event subscriptions
├── logs/ # timestamped log entries
└── tmp/ # scratch space (cleared at boot)

Pith — the engine

Filesystem (the hardware)
│ kqueue / inotify
▼
Watcher ──► Parser ──► Dispatcher ──► 10 subsystems ──► Effector
classify update the react to touch / rm / mv
segments in-memory events, emit (with loop
trie effects avoidance)

Pith never executes programs — it interprets filesystem changes as instructions. Subsystems are pure functions from event to effects; the Effector is the only module that writes. The engine itself never writes a byte of content: its whole effect vocabulary is touch, touch -t, rm, mv.

Quick start

0b install # symlink bin/0b into ~/bin (auto-detects the checkout)
0b init # provision the admin identity
0b up # start the engine# in another terminal:
0b demo # start the metronome

The demo is a metronome: a two-state machine (tick ⇄ tock) encoded entirely as empty files, advanced forever by the scheduler. Watch it beat:

watch -n 1 ls src/programs/metronome/-state src/tmp

Every beat is a zero-byte file appearing, moving, disappearing. The machine runs; nothing is ever written.

A program is a directory

The metronome's full source code:

programs/metronome/
├── -expected/type/program
├── -entry/-state/tick
└── -states/
├── tick/
│ ├── -action/touch/tmp/tick
│ └── -transitions/tock/-condition/events/!schedule_metronome
└── tock/
├── -action/touch/tmp/tock
└── -transitions/tick/-condition/events/!schedule_metronome

States, transitions, conditions, actions — all topology. touch programs/metronome/!run starts it.

Permissions & identity

Permissions are encoded with the § door and enforced by Pith (resolution: deny > own > grant). Identities carry privilege tiers in their first digit (0xx = omni … 8xx = guest). Passwords are argon2id hashes stored — faithfully — in the filename:

hard/identities/001/-secret/.argon2id.v=19.m=19456,t=2,p=1.SALT.DIGEST

See docs/PERMISSIONS.md.

API

Pith exposes newline-delimited JSON over a Unix socket. Any language with file I/O can also just touch and rm directly.

pith("ping") # → {"ok": true, "data": "pong"}pith("ls", "hard/types") # → ["channel", "database", "event", ...]pith("touch", "events/!hello") # create a signalpith("db_query", "colors") # set query over path hierarchies

Operations: ping, status, ls, query, touch, mkdir, rm, mv, db_query, authenticate, create_identity.

How fast is nothing?

Benchmarks are beside the point of a conceptual piece, but the question "what does computing with empty files cost?" turns out to have interesting answers (Apple Silicon, cargo bench / cargo run --release --bin stress):

Operation	Rate
Read a state (in-memory trie lookup)	8.5M/s (0.1 µs)
Check a permission	6.9–20M/s
Create a signal (touch)	14k/s (70 µs)
Full job lifecycle (create → run → complete)	~1,500/s

Reading state is essentially free; writing state costs what the filesystem charges for an inode. The engine adds less than a microsecond on top. The bottleneck of a zero-byte computer is the filesystem itself — which is the point.

Documentation

Document	Content
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md	Vision, primitives, event loop
docs/RESERVED_VALUES.md	The full logic-door alphabet, € escaping
docs/NAMING.md	Naming grammar, path-as-sentence
docs/PERMISSIONS.md	Identity model, § verbs, resolution
docs/FILESYSTEM.md	Complete filesystem organization
docs/IMPLEMENTATION_STATUS.md	What actually works today

License

To be determined.