Abilian Innovation Lab¶
About¶
The Abilian Innovation Lab is Abilian’s research and development arm. This site collects our R&D projects, the open source software that comes out of them, and the technology knowledge base we keep as we work.
Our R&D projects¶
Ongoing¶
These projects are in active development, funded by a mix of internal investment, partnerships, and competitive grants.
Hyper Open X - Hyper Open X offers the technological building blocks for interoperable, sovereign and competitive edge or cloud solutions, using only open source software.
Hop3 - Hop3 is an open-source orchestration platform that simplifies deploying and managing distributed applications across cloud and edge environments. It gives developers and small organisations full control of their IT infrastructure and data, with no vendor lock-in.
Python to WASM Compiler - The Python to WASM compiler translates Python into WebAssembly, on top of WASM GC, so Python runs in web browsers with the performance and the sandboxing that WASM provides. It is published on PyPI as p2w.
Past¶
These projects are finished. They were funded by internal investment, grants, and industry collaborations. The work they produced feeds into what we build now.
Nua: Nua covered the development, selection, installation and resilient operation of web applications in a self-hosted cloud environment. Hop3 has taken over that role.
Cython+: Cython+ set out to bring the multi-core concurrent programming model of Go to Python. It drew on three decades of French work in concurrent object programming, around Actalk.
Wendelin: Wendelin was an open-source big data engine that combined scikit-learn’s machine learning with NEO’s distributed storage framework. It processed datasets larger than memory, building on Numpy and the rest of the Python scientific stack.
Our websites¶
Abilian (our corporate web site) - Abilian is a France-based company working on open-source technologies and digital commons. It has years of experience building and supporting software aligned with Europe’s values and priorities.
The Econ Lab - The Econ Lab is Abilian’s economics research laboratory. It applies the tools of economics (measurement, formal modeling, mechanism design, reproducible computation) to questions where technology architecture and economic power meet. Its current research programme is the economics of European digital sovereignty: nineteen draft working papers, two interactive models, and a reproducible verification suite behind every number.
EuroStack - EuroStack is a directory of European-made and European-supported digital solutions: cloud services, open-source technologies, and interoperable tools. It connects individuals, businesses, and public organizations with software aligned with European values of transparency, privacy, and sustainability.
Our open source projects¶
The lab’s work produces smaller tools and libraries, each documented on its own site. Some are research prototypes, some we use every day.
Compilers, analysis and program transformation¶
astero - astero takes one declaration of a syntax tree and derives from it the structural facts every compiler, transpiler and code analyser needs: which positions bind a variable, which fields a traversal must enter, how tightly each operator binds. Most projects write those tables by hand, once per pass, until they drift. Python’s grammar ships with the library.
postpile - postpile compiles POST Python, the statically typed and compilable subset of Python, ahead of time. A kernel stays an ordinary Python file that runs under plain python. The ppc CLI turns it into a NumPy ufunc, a shared library, or a native executable, through C, QBE, LLVM or WASM backends. It runs numeric kernels around 55x faster than CPython and computes every result byte-identically to CPython’s.
forall - forall verifies type-annotated Python without running it. It lowers each function’s logic to SMT and either finds a replayable crash or proves crash-freedom, so analysing code that opens sockets or deletes files is safe. Every crash it reports comes with a concrete input that raises it, and when it cannot decide it says so.
situ - situ compiles a Python component into JavaScript. You write one reactive component, real HTML on top and Python signals and handlers below, and declare per piece of state whether it lives on the client or on the server. It works with Litestar, ASGI and Flask.
redef - redef examines program transformation in Python: what the ecosystem builds in the absence of macros, what that costs, and how to rewrite a function correctly. It publishes papers, measurements over the top 500 packages, and a library that packages the correctness results.
Terminal and developer tools¶
letscode - letscode is a minimal coding agent for the terminal. Point it at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (Ollama, OpenRouter, vLLM, llama.cpp) and you get a streaming agent loop with four tools (read, write, edit, bash), plus skills, slash commands, persisted sessions, and a plugin system.
terminux - terminux is a cross-platform desktop terminal organised around workspaces. Each project gets its own workspace with its own tabbed terminals, kept alive and arranged where you left them across restarts.
turbodesk - turbodesk renders terminal UIs as pure functions from state to an immutable view tree. An app is a function (UI) -> View that re-runs when a frame is marked dirty. The renderer diffs by row before writing escape codes.
TurboVI - TurboVI is a vi clone for the terminal, about 4,800 lines of Python: modes, counts, operators, registers, marks, macros, split windows, :s, and find-in-project with a quickfix list.
Infrastructure and deployment¶
Punix - Punix is a package manager and service deployer for macOS and Linux. It builds packages from source into a content-addressed store, installs and updates atomically, rolls any deploy back in one second, and works the same way on your laptop or on any host you can reach over plain SSH.
cloudalone - cloudalone runs a small cloud on a single Linux box. It speaks the Hetzner Cloud API, so the official hcloud CLI and the Hetzner client libraries work against your own machine unchanged. Underneath, it is a Litestar app on SQLite driving libvirt and QEMU. Every VM gets its own public IPv6 address.
Documents and figures¶
simplemark - simplemark is a small markup language for Python docstrings and argparse help text: a subset of CommonMark with one narrowed inline rule, so emphasis never happens inside a word. 93% of the 7272 docstrings in the Python 3.12 standard library pass through it unchanged.
svg-plus - svg-plus writes architecture diagrams, infographics and posters from their content, taking over the arithmetic that hand-written SVG spends most of its lines on. Blocks measure themselves, the figure sizes itself to what it contains, and paragraphs are broken with the Knuth-Plass total-fit algorithm against the real metrics of the font you will render with.
Applications¶
Ospobox - Ospobox monitors open source activity across code hosting platforms. It tracks commits, pull requests, issues and releases across several organisations, classifies contributors as internal, external or bots, and scores repository health, so dormant projects in a dependency tree show up early.
Our technology knowledge base¶
The Abilian Knowledge Base collects notes for our own team and for anyone working in software development. It covers business, technology, DevOps, Python, cloud computing, web applications, and our R&D projects.
We curate and update it as we work, so it reflects what we actually use and do. It is organised into sections and subcategories, covering both general and Abilian-specific topics.
Main categories:
Page last modified: 2026-08-31 15:31:45