0003: Verification engine: separate ports driven by generated tables

Status: accepted (Maintainer, 2026-10-16). Plan: ops/plan-architecture.md.

Implemented: not yet (2026-10-22). No per-kind tables are generated from a contract bundle; each port’s tables are still written by hand. The WebAssembly spike has not run.

Context

Verification rules are hand-ported from the Python reference to Rust, TypeScript, Go, .NET and the gateway console. Each new record kind costs a port per language, and a missed table entry can fail open.

Decision

• Keep separate ports in each language. Each is written by hand from the Python reference and checked against the vectors and corpus the reference generates, so a disagreement shows a bug in one of them. Drive their per-kind tables from the core’s registry data in the contract bundle; a missing entry fails to compile or fails a test, never fails open.

• Run a spike later on a WebAssembly build of the Rust offline crate for the TypeScript ./verify entry and the browser, measured on size, sync or async use, and conformance parity, before deciding to adopt it.

Consequences

Adding a record kind becomes a spec entry plus a validator per port. The gateway console’s fourth verifier is retired in favour of the TypeScript offline entry once it exists.

Correction (2026-10-22)

The record first called the ports “independent implementations” whose independence catches bugs in the reference. They are not independent: the same project writes each one by hand from the same Python reference. The wording above says what they are. The decision itself is unchanged.