D068 - Names are generated and proved, never obtained

decided · 2026-08-19 · confirmed by the user

A NID is a truncated SHA-1 and is not invertible, so there is exactly one way back: propose a name, hash it, and see. Two sources feed the proposals, and only one is guesswork.

Published standards are not guesses. The target C library is FreeBSD-derived, so a large part of it is ISO C and POSIX under the names those standards fix. Around 470 of them ship with the tool. This is precisely the lawful reference principle 1 points at.

Everything else is enumerated. Vendor names follow a strict shape - prefix, module, action, object, revision mark - so the plausible space is tiny next to the space of all strings, and small enough to exhaust. Currently 251 million candidates across five shapes.

No database is consulted, bundled, or downloaded. Public NID databases exist and SYMBOLS.md already notes that any file of the right shape will load, but nothing here depends on one. That leaves zero provenance questions attached to a name this tool produces: it was proposed by a grammar in this repository and confirmed by arithmetic.

A match is proof; a miss proves nothing. The hash agrees or it does not, so a reported name is correct rather than probable. A miss says only "not among those tried", which is why the vocabulary is data (principle 5) - extending it is the method, and it must never require a rebuild.

Two things had to be right for this to be usable at scale.

• No allocation on the hot path. Building a String per candidate makes the allocator decide how long a billion-name search takes. Patterns write into a buffer the thread reuses, and NidHasher takes bytes.
• Indexable patterns rather than iterators. A pattern produces its nth name directly, by reading the index as a mixed-radix number over its word lists. Threads then take disjoint integer ranges, share nothing, and produce a result that does not depend on how many of them ran.

Measured: 26 million candidates per second on sixteen threads - 251 million in under ten seconds, a billion in about forty.