Programming Language

Nocter

A self-contained systems language built around simplicity, encapsulation, and foolproof design.

Documentation GitHub
/development/milestones/v0.26.0-release-preparation.md

v0.26.0 Release Preparation

Status: release candidate qualified, published, and externally audited (2026-09-02). This record owns the candidate identity, qualification contract, and final local artifact evidence. The immutable publication evidence is ../releases/v0.26.0.md.

Release Boundary

v0.26.0 adds normalized non-negative Duration values, opaque monotonic Instant observations, checked duration arithmetic, and blocking time.sleep. The public surface does not expose target ticks, clock identifiers, syscall details, or calendar representations. All public time operations publish noalloc; sleep makes no non-blocking or realtime promise.

The compiler owns three closed target primitive roles for monotonic observation, counter frequency, and wrapping subtraction. ARM64 emits an instruction-ordered counter observation. The standard library alone owns counter conversion, normalization, rounding, interruption retry, chunking, and public failure policy. The bundled standard declaration profile is one physical locator authority outside Session.

The public release notes are ../../releases/v0.26.0.md.

Candidate Identity

The release inputs agree on 0.26.0:

  • development/packaging/VERSION, the sole authored release-version input;
  • the #package version in development/std/index.nct;
  • the archive name and installed manifest derived from VERSION and RELEASE.json;
  • compiler and language-server reporting derived from the validated installed home.

The exact release-content commit is 9ff855385a992def6d38a4d4f6b639f976c7bd24 (Prepare v0.26.0 release candidate). All source and artifact qualification below used this commit with a clean worktree.

Qualification Contract

The clean release-content commit must pass:

  1. 1. two independent complete locked workspace test runs in distinct external Cargo targets;
  2. warnings-denied all-target Clippy in both external targets;
  3. formatter, no-default-features checking, documentation generation and reproducibility, repository whitespace, and packaging-input validation;
  4. the explicit public-HTTPS dependency-acquisition test;
  5. checks and representative native execution for every public example against an isolated candidate home;
  6. two independent optimized package builds with byte-identical archives and recursively identical installed homes;
  7. fresh extraction checks for version, doctor, help, initialization, locked/offline check and test, deterministic graph, native run, explicit build and execution, and framed LSP analysis;
  8. rejection after either the installed compiler or standard-library content is changed, plus proof that ordinary qualification commands do not mutate the installed home.

Source Qualification

Two independent external Cargo targets each completed the locked workspace test suite with 1,507 passed, zero failed, and one explicitly ignored network test. Warnings-denied all-target Clippy passed independently in both targets. The ignored public-HTTPS dependency-acquisition test then passed when run explicitly.

The same candidate passed the no-default-features workspace check, cargo fmt --check, packaging shell and JavaScript syntax validation, repository whitespace validation, and deterministic generation and testing of all 365 documentation pages.

Artifact Qualification

Two clean optimized package builds produced byte-identical archives and recursively identical installed homes. The retained candidate is:

  • archive: dist/nocter-v0.26.0-arm64-darwin.tar.gz;
  • size: 8,266,313 bytes;
  • archive SHA-256: a8898d54ca578a7bb9980d330fa48067df798a832a882ab1e047e17356833700;
  • compiler SHA-256: 01d4a9dca781df11fc2b47e38258d38ddbab74f2d7ea0c4de73bcfedb1e5bee5;
  • standard-library tree SHA-256: e1ad3af8c04a8f8a9c5043fbda4d7206e3e6954fe0011e53ccb35ac9fbc1abb7;
  • standard-library files: 120.

A fresh extraction reported release 0.26.0 for arm64-darwin and passed doctor, help, initialization, locked/offline package check and test, all eight single-file examples, all five package examples, deterministic package graphs, native run, explicit build and execution, and framed LSP analysis. These commands did not mutate the installed home. Independent compiler and standard-library tampering were both rejected.

Publication

Separately authorized publication reused the retained archive without rebuilding it, advanced the public download links in a separate commit, created and pushed an annotated v0.26.0 tag, uploaded exactly this archive, and verified the public download byte for byte. Existing published tags and assets must not be replaced.