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What every repository is held to

What every repository is held to

The same conformance standard applies across every organisation in the map. That is what makes them one ecosystem rather than a pile of unrelated modules: a caller can assume the same things about any of them without reading its CI configuration.

CGO_ENABLED=0

No cgo, and no shelling out to a command-line tool in place of a library. A dependency is a Go module or it is written.

The rule is stricter than it first sounds, because exec.Command to a CLI is the usual way a cgo dependency comes back in disguise — the binary is still C, it is just C the build no longer sees. A library that runs mkfs.ext4 has not removed the C dependency; it has removed the compiler’s knowledge of it.

What the rule buys, concretely: cross-compilation to six architectures from one machine, a js/wasm build that runs the same code in a browser tab, and a bare-metal target with no libc underneath.

Six 64-bit targets

Build and test on amd64, arm64, riscv64, loong64, ppc64le and s390x — native where runners exist, under qemu-user (Debian trixie, per-architecture QEMU_CPU) otherwise.

s390x earns its place by being big-endian. Any on-disk or on-wire encoding that was quietly written little-endian-first fails there and nowhere else, which is exactly the bug that is invisible on a developer’s machine and fatal in a file format.

100% statement coverage

A CI gate, error branches included.

Two clarifications that matter more than the number:

  • A skipped test is not a passing one. Jobs fail when a toolchain or a device is missing, rather than turning green with the interesting case unexecuted. A green run whose -run filter matched nothing is worse than a red one, because it is believed.
  • Coverage is measured the way CI measures it — with -coverpkg over the packages under test, not per-package defaults that can report 100% while leaving a package unexercised.

Measured, not asserted

A performance claim comes with a benchmark against the reference implementation — MRI for the Ruby stack, the C library for a codec, numpy or scipy for a numeric kernel. A claim that an implementation is faithful to a format comes with a byte comparison against that reference, not a round-trip through itself.

Decoders are fuzzed. On the filesystem drivers, 70 million executions found two denial-of-service panics that no hand-written test had reached.

Where a claim is about something that runs — a window opening, a widget drawing, a page rendering — it is verified by capture, not by reasoning about the code.

Reference libraries first

Where a good pure-Go library already exists, it is used rather than rewritten. The ecosystem is large because a great many capabilities had no pure-Go implementation, not because everything was rebuilt on principle — and one organisation in it has already been retired for duplicating a reference library that was itself CGO-free.

One landing, one docs site

Each organisation publishes a Hugo landing page at <org>.github.io and versioned MkDocs Material documentation at <org>.github.io/docs/, with the same brand, an 88-pixel hero logo, a favicon, and a light/dark/system theme toggle that defaults to system.

BSD-3-Clause

Every repository, every organisation. Copyright is held by the authors of the organisation the code lives in.

Go 1.26.4 floor

New repositories set the go directive to 1.26.4 — the full patch version, not a bare 1.26. A low go directive is never deliberate; where one is found it is a drift to fix, not a compatibility decision to respect.