Noyalib research frontier

noyalib Research Frontier

Progressive disclosure. The bulk of this skill — the four full open-problem statements and the verbatim worked examples — lives in reference.md. This page is the compact index: thesis, problem index, methodology rules, non-goals, cross-refs, provenance.

Open problems + the discipline. Nothing here is committed roadmap; everything is a candidate direction with a falsifiable "you have a result when…" milestone attached.

• Audience: mid-level engineer or Sonnet-class model with time to spend on research-shaped work (weeks, not hours).
• Scope: pure-Rust YAML library noyalib v0.0.14.
• Frontier thesis (chosen 2026-07-07): YAML-spec leadership. Conformance beyond the official test suite; edge-case authority; upstream spec/suite contributions; the reference implementation for YAML 1.2.2 ambiguities.
• Date-stamp: 2026-07-07. Every claim below carries a re-verify command so it can be re-checked before being repeated.
• Not this skill:
  • Positioning / marketing claims → noyalib-external-positioning.
  • Executing a measured campaign (coverage, benchmark chase) → noyalib-coverage-campaign.
  • Settled battles → noyalib-failure-archaeology.
  • Live triage → noyalib-debugging-playbook.

---

Provenance — re-verify before quoting numbers

Everything volatile below was captured 2026-07-07. Re-run before repeating:

grep -n "skip" crates/noyalib/tests/official_suite.rs | head
grep -n "SKIP_LIST\|skip" crates/noyalib/tests/yaml_compliance_report.rs | head
ls crates/noyalib/tests/yaml-test-suite/*.yaml | wc -l
grep -c '^#\[test\]' crates/noyalib/tests/competitor_bugs.rs
ls fuzz/fuzz_targets/fuzz_diff.rs fuzz/fuzz_targets/fuzz_yaml_v1_1.rs \
    fuzz/fuzz_targets/fuzz_strict.rs

Captured 2026-07-07 (label: candidate, not target):

• SKIP_LIST in both official_suite.rs and yaml_compliance_report.rs is &[]. The regression net treats the entire suite as active — any future skip has to be argued for in writing in the same file.
• Bundled suite copy: ~351 .yaml case wrappers.
• Competitor-bug fixtures: 27 #[test] entries in competitor_bugs.rs.
• Differential fuzz targets present: fuzz_diff, fuzz_yaml_v1_1, fuzz_strict, plus fuzz_no_span_loader, fuzz_double_quoted, fuzz_borrowed_alias, fuzz_multi_doc, fuzz_parse, fuzz_roundtrip, fuzz_from_value.

If any has drifted, use the new number — do not quote this page.

---

Frontier thesis

No Rust YAML crate is treated by the ecosystem as the arbiter of YAML 1.2.2 ambiguities. The seat is empty; noyalib has the minimum viable base camp to compete for it. Five on-the-ground assets justify that claim: a full-suite runner that generates a categorised gap report (not a pass-rate badge); strict-1.2-by-default posture (ADR-0002); a 27-entry competitor_bugs.rs corpus already cross-referenced to peer tickets; a CST (ADR-0001) that can represent byte-exact edge cases; and a fuzz_diff harness already running noyalib × serde_yaml_ng × saphyr. Not "noyalib is the arbiter now" — "the seat is empty and this codebase has the tooling to compete for it".

Full evidence table (all five assets, spec-§ citations, SOTA-failure statement in long form): see reference.md § Frontier thesis — evidence (extended).

---

Open-problems index

Each is a candidate direction with a first-three-steps block and a falsifiable Result-when milestone. Full narrative for each in reference.md.

• (a) Close the skipped-case set — SKIP_LIST = &[] is a published zero; each future skip needs written spec-§ rationale. → reference.md § Open problem (a)
• (b) Edge-case conformance database beyond the suite — lift competitor_bugs.rs + failure-archaeology into a citable spec-referenced corpus other crates can adopt. → reference.md § Open problem (b)
• (c) Upstream spec/suite contributions — push fail-lenient and fail-value-mismatch cases into yaml-test-suite / spec errata rather than treating the suite as read-only. → reference.md § Open problem (c)
• (d) Differential conformance harness as a service — turn fuzz_diff's abort stream into a per-release published divergence table, cited externally. → reference.md § Open problem (d)

---

Research methodology summary

Compact rule list. Each rule has a specific failure mode in this codebase it's protecting against; the verbatim worked examples that justify each rule live in reference.md § Research methodology — worked examples.

Evidence bar.

• One mechanism must explain ALL observations, including negatives. A hypothesis that says "X causes symptom A" but doesn't say why X-adjacent symptom A' is absent is under-specified. → see silent-collapse worked example.
• Adversarial refutation before landing: assign someone (Sonnet-class model, or yourself in an adversarial seat) to find the counter-example. Counter-example landing = hypothesis wrong or scope narrower than claimed; both are findings.

Hypothesis predicts numbers.

• Benchmark expectations written down before the run. If the number lands where predicted, that's a much stronger signal than "looks fine". → see merge-key clone gate worked example.
• If the number lands and the prediction wasn't written first, you don't know whether the mechanism you think explains it actually did.

Idea lifecycle.

1. Experiment (bench, fuzz target, throwaway branch — cheap, disposable).
2. Cross-path validation across the ~4-5 parse entry points (from_str, load_all_as, cst::parse_document, Loader, NoSpanLoader).
3. Change-control PR (spec § or failing test cited; CI green on every feature-matrix job; regression test shipped or written refusal).
4. Adopted OR documented retirement (fizzled directions → failure- archaeology "Attempted, not adopted").

Where good ideas historically came from. Community PRs (#117, #118) that were narrow + spec-cited + tested; incident follow-ups (every failure-archaeology entry began this way); competitor-bug mining; bench regressions. Full form in reference.md § Where good ideas historically came from.

---

Non-goals (fenced — do not spend research budget here)

• YAML 1.3 / 2.0 speculation. No stable target. 1.2.2 is the active spec; research work targets it.
• Forking the yaml-test-suite. Contribute upstream. A private fork loses the "citable common floor" property that makes conforming to the suite meaningful.
• Trading the strict-1.2 default for compatibility wins. ADR-0002 is settled; 1.1 semantics remain available via ParserConfig::version.
• New feature velocity that isn't security / conformance / performance driven. Per the security-first posture memory (2026-07-07): research budget goes to hardening, correctness, and the frontier thesis, not surface expansion.

---

When NOT to use this skill

• Marketing / positioning claims. "noyalib is the most spec-compliant Rust YAML crate" is a positioning statement, not a research finding. → noyalib-external-positioning (when authored).
• Executing a measured campaign (coverage push, benchmark improvement, targeted parity work). → noyalib-coverage-campaign (when authored).
• Live triage of a red CI / regression. → noyalib-debugging-playbook.
• Looking up why an existing design is shaped a particular way. → noyalib-failure-archaeology (settled battles) or doc/adr/ (settled decisions).
• Making a change to code without a research question attached. → noyalib-change-control for the process, noyalib-architecture-contract for the shape constraints.

---

Re-verify this file

Before quoting anything on this page to an outside audience, re-run the Provenance section commands. The frontier's starting inventory (skip list, suite size, fixture count, differential-target list) is the volatile part — everything else on this page is methodology and thesis. Methodology and thesis don't rot on a weekly cadence, but the numbers do.

Last full re-verify: 2026-07-07.