Semlith Files

Credit where the index comes from

Semlith's vector index is turbovec, by Ryan Codrai, under the MIT licence, and it implements TurboQuant — "TurboQuant: Online Vector Quantization with Near-optimal Distortion Rate", Amir Zandieh, Majid Daliri, Majid Hadian and Vahab Mirrokni. That is not an implementation detail: a data-oblivious quantizer needs no training pass over the corpus, which is why a store can be built from a file save with no rebuild as it grows. The README named turbovec twice as a filename component, linked it nowhere, and did not name the paper at all.

Added

• A ## Prior art section in the README, citing the paper by title, its four authors and its arXiv id, and turbovec by author, licence and repository, with two sentences on what data-oblivious buys a local index. The first prose mention is a link as well.
• tests/readme.rs asserts the README carries both the turbovec repository URL and 2504.19874, so an edit that drops either fails the build. Its line ceiling moves from 500 to 520 for the new section, once, with the reason in the doc comment beside it.
• tests/portal.rs asserts no semver literal appears in a user-visible string in src/portal/app.js. This is the README's release-content gate applied to the surface a user reads inside the product, which had none.

Fixed

• NOTICE named BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5 as the default model, which the product stopped using. It names granite-embedding-small-english-r2 at int8 and the repository it is fetched from, the CLIP ViT-B/32 vision and text pair a store fetches once it holds an image, and the licence each one states. Its turbovec block cites the paper rather than gesturing at "Google Research", and ONNX Runtime and hf-hub are named with what each one actually downloads.
• docs/architecture.md, which the README calls the full account, described the single-file index that store format 2 replaced in 0.7.0 — including a crash-safety argument and an atomic-write argument stated over the wrong object. Every such passage is re-derived from the code that writes a shard: the rename gives per-shard atomicity and nothing more, and what covers an interrupted run is the hashes being committed last. The store diagram is now the directory as it is on disk.
• The portal's About page said forty grammars arrived in a named release and that the binary had grown by a measured number of MiB against another one — three versions and four figures, hardcoded, where no reader could tell which build they described. The passage is gone and what a reader can act on is a clause in the paragraph above it.

A Ctrl-C guarantee that CI can see fail

an_interrupted_watcher_leaves_the_store_whole had been failing since 0.17.0 and nobody heard, because it is #[ignore]d and CI does not run the ignored set (#85). The cause was the test, not the product: it gave the spawned watcher a hard-coded two seconds to install its signal handler, and the first exec of a freshly linked binary spends seconds inside execve at zero CPU while the kernel validates the Mach-O. The forty grammars 0.17.0 added took the binary past the point where that finished in under two seconds, so the SIGINT arrived before main did. src/watch.rs was never wrong.

• The test now waits for the watcher's own watching … banner, which is printed after the handler is installed, instead of for a clock. No number can be the right number there — the binary will grow again.
• .github/smoke.sh gains cli/watch/sigint-whole, which interrupts a real watcher and then checks the exit status, that no half-written index was left behind, and that every chunk still has a vector. It runs against the installed binary on ubuntu-latest and macos-latest on every develop PR, so the guarantee now has a gate that runs. Windows has no row by design: watch::stop_on_signal is #[cfg(unix)] and Ctrl-C there is a documented no-op.

Removed

• The About page's MCP revisions row. Four protocol dates are a wire contract between the server and an agent client, not something a person reading About can act on. GET /api/about still returns them and dropping one is still a declared break.

Install

macOS and Linux

:::sh
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/semlith/semlith/main/install.sh | sh

Windows

:::powershell
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/semlith/semlith/main/install.ps1 | iex

Or download the archive for your platform below, unpack it, and put semlith on your PATH. Intel macOS has no prebuilt binary: ONNX Runtime no longer publishes x86_64 macOS builds.

Verify a download against SHA256SUMS before running it.