Philement

Philement is a family of small pieces that are supposed to add up to a machine you can run locally and then forget about.

The first piece is Hydrogen: a compact, multithreaded C process that already knows how to be a web server, a websocket host, an identity provider, a database client, a mail and print queue, and an MCP endpoint. It is meant to be generic. Print farms are one use. So are other appliances that need a sturdy host and do not want a cloud account or a sidecar for every concern.

Extensibility is pushed where it belongs. Almost everything you will want to add is Lua, against a sandboxed host API, or it is data in the database layer. There is no plugin folder and no pip install into the host. On the rare day the host is actually missing a primitive — MCP was one of those — you change the C. That code is structured, documented, and tested on purpose, so changing it is a normal patch, not a hack bolted on the side.

If the only thing this project accomplishes is a C host with Lua on top instead of a Python one, that is already a service. The process stays…