Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

Hardening Matrix

This chapter translates the large PARC test surface into an explicit hardening ladder.

The important point is not “how many tests exist”. The important point is which surfaces are carrying confidence for real-header parsing, preprocessing, and source extraction.

How To Read The Matrix

Read each surface on three axes:

  • hermetic or host-dependent
  • parser-only versus scan-first
  • success path versus conservative failure path

A surface is stronger when it is:

  • hermetic
  • scan-first
  • repeated deterministically
  • tied to a realistic system or library family

Tier 1: Hermetic Canonical Baselines

These are the first surfaces that should stay green on every machine:

  • vendored musl stdint
  • vendored zlib
  • vendored libpng builtin-preprocessor success path
  • repo-owned macro_env_a hostile macro corpus
  • repo-owned type_env_b hostile type corpus
  • parser and extraction corpus fixtures under src/tests/**

These matter because they exercise:

  • multi-header scanning
  • macro and include handling
  • extraction into SourcePackage
  • deterministic behavior without relying on the host toolchain layout

Tier 2: Host-Dependent Canonical Ladders

These should stay green on developer and CI hosts where the headers exist, but they are not the first portability baseline:

  • OpenSSL public wrapper extraction
  • combined Linux event-loop wrapper extraction
  • larger libc and system-header clusters

These surfaces matter because they are closer to the “real ugly header world” target than the small synthetic fixtures.

Tier 3: Hostile And Conservative-Failure Surfaces

These prove that PARC is refusing or degrading honestly instead of pretending to understand everything:

  • hostile declaration fixtures
  • repo-owned hostile corpora that force builtin-preprocessor macro and typedef expansion
  • recovery fixtures
  • unsupported or partial declaration families that still emit diagnostics and partial metadata
  • extraction-status summaries that distinguish supported, partial, and unsupported output trust

For release purposes, these failures are good when they are:

  • deterministic
  • diagnostic
  • documented

Determinism Anchors

The most important repeat-run anchors right now are:

  • vendored musl scan
  • vendored zlib scan
  • vendored libpng scan
  • macro_env_a scan
  • type_env_b scan
  • OpenSSL wrapper extraction
  • combined Linux event-loop wrapper extraction

If any of those become unstable, the release posture should drop immediately.

What This Matrix Does Not Mean

This matrix does not mean:

  • every random system library now parses perfectly
  • every preprocessor corner is solved
  • every large host-dependent surface is equally mature

It means the current confidence ladder is explicit instead of implied.