Contributor Documentation

Nocter development is contract-first. Language, platform, and tooling behavior belongs in spec/. Standard-library behavior belongs with its compiler-checked public surface under development/std. Implementation milestones and reviews record how the compiler reached those contracts without becoming another authority.

Current Work

Current handoff — next concrete work and blockers only
Compiler architecture — pipeline and cross-crate authority boundaries
Architecture and maintenance documents
Compiler workspace
Performance measurement — external latency evidence and query-count boundary
Development verification — disposable complete compiler gates
Documentation site generator — authored website inputs and output boundary
Development history — milestones, reviews, legacy design, and publication audits

The active compiler workspace is under development/compiler/. Superseded implementations and their rewrite records remain available through the development history, but are not behavioral or architectural inputs.

Specification Workflow

When a public rule is incomplete, implementation pauses. The ambiguity is reduced to a minimal program, alternatives are compared, and the user selects the language behavior. The adopted rule is written in the owning specification chapter before implementation or conformance tests proceed.

The specification is the sole source for:

lexical and syntactic grammar
name resolution and visibility
type identity, inference, conversion, and dispatch
ownership, borrowing, provenance, regions, and destruction
evaluation order, failure, allocation, and cleanup
target ABI and executable behavior
command-line and editor contracts

Compiler-checked standard-library declarations and declaration documentation belong to module index.nct files. The standard-library catalog assigns each longer observable subject to one behavior guide without repeating signatures.

Repository Layout

development/
├── AGENTS.md
├── README.md
├── TODO.md
├── benchmarks/        # repeatable external compiler and editor measurements
├── compiler/          # specification-first compiler workspace
├── design/            # active cross-crate architecture and maintenance policy
├── history/           # non-normative engineering records, excluded from the website
├── packaging/         # release identity, deterministic assembly, and artifact qualification
├── site/              # documentation generator and static website inputs
├── std/               # standard-library contracts and implementation sources
├── unicode/           # generated Unicode source data and its generator
└── verification/      # disposable development verification entry points

Rust, Cargo, and Node.js are development requirements for the workspace and release qualification.