D044 - The open toolchain is a lawful source for interface facts, never for implementations

decided · 2026-08-19

The OpenOrbis Toolchain is a legal, open-source LLVM/Clang cross-compiler with headers, library stubs, startup code, and linker scripts, built without vendor tools. Previous-generation only, which fits the test-material decision already recorded in SCOPE.md.

Two uses, both legitimate, and one line between them:

• Build test material. Our own compiled apps are real containers with clean provenance - we wrote the source. That is better input for the parser than byte-crafted fixtures for the happy path, though synthetic fixtures are still needed for truncation, bad offsets, and malformed tables that a compiler will never emit.
• Learn interface facts. It is open source, so reading it is ordinary engineering under D024. It can seed D025's symbol name list without brute-forcing, and give real values for the 37 provisional arities.

The line: never let its implementations inform ours. Signatures and names are interface facts; behaviour is not. Credited in ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md either way.