ELANG

Electronic Language — An open, standardized digital format for defining, preserving, and exchanging human and constructed languages.

ELANG is a portable, deterministic definition and packaging format for constructed languages, together with its Rust reference tooling. This repository is the reference implementation: the .elang binary container, the KDL 2.0 package.epf descriptor, the KDL 2.0 .eld Linguistic Definition extension (v0.1.0 ships the phonemes module only), SHA-256 integrity, canonical reproducible encoding, and a reader/writer/validator SDK plus a CLI.

Documentation

The public documentation site is built with Zensical from the Markdown sources in docs/public/ and configured by zensical.toml. It is published to GitHub Pages by .github/workflows/docs.yml on pushes to main that touch the docs, and is served at https://rockydevworks.github.io/elang-rs/.

The internal normative material (the steering contract, ADRs, requirements, and the open-artifact tracker) lives under docs/ and .kiro/ and is the source of truth that the public site is derived from.

Status

Pre-release, tracking v0.1.0. Several normative artifacts (the exact approved IPA allowlist, its canonical SHA-256, and the META-INF/integrity.kdl grammar) are open artifacts that must be produced and reviewed before the conformance suite is frozen. See docs/specification.md and the open-artifact tracker in .kiro/specs/elang-v0.1.0/requirements.md.

Version domains

ELANG keeps several independent version domains. A change in one does not imply a change in another.

Domain	Value	Notes
Specification release	0.1.0	The normative spec this code targets
Binary container	0.1.0	Header major 0, minor 1
EPF (package.epf)	0.1.0	Descriptor schema
ELD (phoneme inventory)	0.1.0	.eld schema
Language release	strict MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH	Chosen by each language author
Canonical compression profile	elang-canonical-zstd-v1	Reproducible Zstd settings

The reader supports binary 0.1 only. Header/format.version's first two components MUST match the header major/minor; the patch component cannot change the binary grammar.

Supported scope

A compliant phoneme-only package contains exactly these logical resources:

Header/format.version
mimetype
package.epf
META-INF/integrity.kdl
Linguistics/phonemes.eld   # path configurable via the EPF manifest

ELANG does not define lexicons, phonotactics, morphology, syntax, semantics, prosody, audio, GUI, dependency management, repository ownership or publisher signatures. A verified package digest proves integrity, not authorship.

Workspace layout

crates/
  elang-core/         IDs, errors, limits, validated models
  elang-container/    header/index/footer, frame I/O, reader/writer
  elang-kdl/          constrained KDL 2.0 parsing and canonical emission
  elang-epf/          package.epf schema and validation
  elang-eld/          phoneme model, IPA, `when` AST, canonical ELD
  elang-repertoire/   pinned Unicode/IPA allowlist and verification
  elang-integrity/    integrity manifest and SHA-256 verification
  elang-conformance/  fixture runner and interoperability checks
  elang-cli/          inspect, verify, validate, pack, unpack, canonicalize
specs/                authoritative schemas and registries
fixtures/             positive, negative, byte-exact, fuzz seeds
docs/                 normative spec, ADRs, security and CLI docs
.kiro/                steering contract and the v0.1.0 spec breakdown

Building

cargo build --workspace
cargo test  --workspace
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets

Toolchain and MSRV

The build pins channel = "stable" via rust-toolchain.toml. The minimum supported Rust version (MSRV) is 1.90, declared as rust-version in every crate and enforced in CI. Raising the MSRV requires an ADR under docs/decisions/.

CLI (preview)

The elang binary will expose:

elang inspect   <file>              stages 1–7  (structure only, no integrity)
elang verify    <file>              stages 1–11 (all resources hashed)
elang validate  <file>              stages 1–12 (full ELD semantic validation)
elang pack      <dir> -o <file>     build a package
elang unpack    <file> -o <dir>     extract safely (no traversal/symlink escape)
elang canonicalize-eld <in> -o <out>
elang repertoire info               show pinned chart/Unicode/digest

inspect is not a full integrity check; only verify and validate hash every resource. The CLI exits non-zero on any validation failure.

Security and trust model

See SECURITY.md. In short: ELANG defends against malicious archives (decompression bombs, path traversal, parser abuse) with bounded, streaming, checked-arithmetic code, and it never treats a hash or URN-like identifier as proof of publisher identity.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE.