News
Milestones and working announcements from the engine, shell, and campus lanes. Entries are written from proofs and transcripts -- when something is demonstrated, it gets reported; when it is not, it does not appear here.
Working log
Smaller milestones between announcements, newest first.
Release 145 went live with the catalog at 241 command keys matched to 241 parsed contracts, zero fallback rows, and a HELP store that had just shed a duplicated usage-contract family: 29,700 line rows down to 18,566, artifacts and sections falling 14,844 to 10,587 apiece, contract drift reaching zero. Then the banner on all 151 published pages was found still reading 'Full-stack docs reconciled 2026-09-02'. Six freshness contracts had passed throughout, because every one of them compares a page against an authority file, and that authority was typed by hand and had not been regenerated. The pages agreed with the authority and the authority agreed with itself. The fix was to give it a generator, which is the one thing the two artifacts sitting beside it already had.
A manual acceptance ran four times before it was allowed to land. Three plans were built and thrown away, and all four reported PASS_PLAN_ONLY with zero findings. The discarded ones would have joined text across a field boundary mid-word, turning 'not the command name' into 'not the comm and name', and welded list items into sentences on eight pages. The measurement in use, a fragment count, fell for a wrong join exactly as it fell for a right one. What caught them was diffing every staged page against its accepted counterpart and refusing to leave any difference unexplained.
The command reference the site links to was accepted in July and tracked by git for the first time on 2026-09-02: all 165 pages landed as new files. The reader page was tracked; the pages it links to were not, so nothing looked wrong from either end. Every acceptance in that window wrote into files git could not see, which meant no acceptance could be reviewed as a diff. A link-integrity gate now asserts that every page the accepted index links to exists and is tracked, and 47 unreferenced orphan pages were removed.
The current documentation pass closed its development checks with 239 command keys matched to 239 parsed contracts, no fallback command rows, 670 reachable HELP topics, and a new 25-section manual candidate. The local website now carries those measurements, while publication remains deliberately held at the owner gate.
The workbench can inspect a memo that carries a complete MINIDB container and hydrate its tables and native indexes into RAM. The demonstrated sample rebuilt thirteen tables and eleven index containers from the memo payload; recursive and nested multi-workspace management remains clearly labeled Alpha work.
The application UI definition lane now has a DBF/FPT design-table contract and early wxWidgets, Tk, HTML, and character-cell consumers. It is featured as Alpha: useful implementation exists, while the proposed text commands and remaining native proof are still open.
- 2026-08-21Visual FoxPro forms and menus, read directlytooling
A form or menu saved by Visual FoxPro is a database table with a memo sidecar, so the reader that opens a table opens those too. Reading real ones settled what any converter would have to handle: one form carried twenty-four distinct control classes, and the columns of a grid turned out to have no records at all -- they exist only as a count kept on the parent, so walking the records alone loses every label inside the grid. The menu language proved to be ordinary text that FoxPro itself writes out, which means a menu and the program generated from it are a matched pair a future generator can be checked against rather than argued about.
- 2026-08-17The Python binding becomes its own productbuild
pydottalk was being built as a switch of the engine build, so producing a four-source module also compiled the entire command-line runtime and the terminal UI library it never referenced. It now builds standalone against the same engine sources, with its own build presets and its own lifecycle charter.
- 2026-08-17The maintenance console gets a light themetooling
Every colour moved behind theme variables, so no literal value can outlive a theme change. Contrast was measured rather than eyeballed, and the light default now matches the website's own preference key instead of inventing a second one.
- 2026-08-16Five guards that could not failquality
Five checks across the toolchain returned the same answer for "nothing is wrong" and "nothing was examined", and each had been passing for months. Every one now judges against a declared truth, and each new test was proven able to fail before it was trusted.
- 2026-08-15Record locking, re-proven from the ground upengine
A locale installed for console text encoding also changed number formatting, which corrupted the owner identifier written into lock sidecars. A lock could therefore be reclaimed while its owner was still running. Fixed at the cause, made fail-closed, and covered by the first test the lock subsystem has ever had.
- 2026-08-12Workspace write-back closed to greenengine
The write-back path now refuses a collision without writing anything, replaces only on explicit confirmation, and keeps a recoverable backup. Each assertion was checked for its ability to fail before the suite was believed.
Latest announcements
All announcements →Press releases
Deliberately minimal for now: 4 early posts are retained as history, and a proper press surface is an open to-do -- it will be built when there is a release to press about, not before.