Conformance

A specification without a conformance suite drifts — independent implementations diverge silently. (ActivityPub shipped a W3C Recommendation with no test suite for ~5 years; the fediverse is still paying for it.) XNet ships a language‑agnostic golden‑vector corpus alongside the spec, from day one, and re‑verifies it in CI.

The corpus lives at conformance/.

What conformance means

You claim conformance to a layer by reproducing that layer’s vectors byte‑for‑byte. The vectors are plain JSON { description, input, expected } — any language can load them.

Suite	Layer	Proves
`vectors/identity/`	L0	seed → `did:key` + public key
`vectors/change/`	L1	unsigned change → canonical bytes → BLAKE3 hash → Ed25519 signature
`vectors/lww/`	L1	change sequence → converged state (order‑independent)
`vectors/replication/`	L2	planned
`vectors/authz/`	L3	planned

xnet/1.0’s first corpus covers the interop kernel (L0 + L1). L2/L3 suites are tracked as XPPs.

Example vector

{
  "description": "First change for a Page node, fixed author seed",
  "input": { "authorSeedHex": "aaaa…", "unsignedChange": { /* … */ } },
  "expected": {
    "authorDID": "did:key:z6Mkv1o2…",
    "canonicalJson": "{\"authorDID\":\"did:key:z6Mkv1o2…\",…}",
    "hash": "cid:blake3:76fdfa20…",
    "signatureBase64": "UcVsz+sh…=="
  }
}

The drift guard

# verify (CI drift guard)
pnpm exec vitest run --project runtime packages/runtime/src/conformance.test.ts

# the second-language proof
pip install pynacl blake3 base58
python conformance/reference/python/verify_vectors.py

The conformance matrix

Following Willow’s lightweight model, conforming implementations are tracked per layer:

Implementation	Language	L0 identity	L1 change	L1 lww	L2	L3
`xNet` (reference)	TypeScript	✅	✅	✅	reference	reference
`reference/python`	Python	✅	✅	—	—	—
add yours

To add your implementation, reproduce the vectors and open a PR against conformance/README.md.