The Five VASTE Primitives

Closed vocabulary

VASTE permits no sixth primitive. Operationally important concepts such as System, Actor, Workspace, Program, projection, host and extension are composed above the primitive layer. This keeps the kernel independent from product meaning.

Vertex

A Vertex is behaviorless data with id, systemId, a namespaced type, serializable data and optional metadata. The validator rejects functions, circular structures, non-finite numbers and invalid metadata versions. Every Vertex belongs to exactly one System partition. A freshly bootstrapped System is represented by a system:root Vertex; shared systemId establishes membership, while explicit Ties refine nested topology.

Tie

A Tie is a directed relation with its own ID, System, endpoints, namespaced type, domain reference and metadata. The runtime validates endpoint and System boundaries. Cross-System relations require both an explicit allowance and target System ID. A Tie is topology, not a hidden mutation channel.

Action

An Action describes admitted intent. The primitive contract requires it to be declarative, serializable, replayable and deterministic, with namespace, authority, access level, input/output contracts, preconditions, postconditions, failure modes and state transitions. Primitive validation rejects embedded handlers and direct mutation fields. Routing and effects belong to the runtime.

Surface

Surface is the authorityless membrane through which a Vertex-System may be observed or interacted with. Its invariant scanner rejects runtime, store, dispatch and mutation-like fields. SurfaceSpec enriches the membrane; lifecycle and projection state are runtime-owned. A Surface can be materialized as web, shell, API, stream or another support, but the support is not its identity.

Environment

Environment is immutable and recreated for an execution. It carries the resolved System, identity and authority claims, permissions, invocation scope, trace, execution tick, resource budgets and optional graph location. It explicitly carries no persistence, state storage, computation results or cross-execution accumulation.

Boundaries that matter

• System: isolation partition plus root closure; compatibility/runtime boundary, not primitive.
• Actor: identity and admission extension; typically represented by specialized Vertices.
• Partition: all graph records scoped by one systemId.
• Closure: selected portable structural content, either an entire partition or a contained subtree.
• Projection: derived observation; never canonical state by itself.
• Environment: local execution context, excluded from portable graph packages.

Evidence and limit

Contracts live in packages/contracts/src/primitives.ts; runtime validators live in src/primitives; integration tests cover namespace, boundaries, execution and kernel purity. These internal validations support the primitive claims. They do not establish that every extension or future platform layer is complete.