Contributing#

Thanks for helping .mini grow. There are three kinds of contribution.

A new fork (most welcome)#

1. Read FORKING.md.
2. mini new-fork <prefix> [--from <parent>] --add ... and edit the contract.
3. Add fixtures/valid.mini, fixtures/canonical.json, fixtures/escaping.mini, fixtures/escaping.json and the negative cases.
4. Write README.md (purpose, layout table, example) — benchmark/make_forks.py::write_readme shows the expected shape.
5. Run mini check-forks, python -m unittest discover -s tests, node tests/test_js_port.mjs.
6. Open a PR titled fork: <prefix> — <name>. Add your fork to the benchmark by giving it 12 base records in benchmark/domains.py (optional but appreciated).

Prefix naming: short, lowercase, unique. Do not reuse a prefix with an incompatible layout — that is a new prefix.

Implementation changes#

Both implementations (Python src/minifmt, JavaScript js/mini.js) must stay in agreement: any change to the lexical rules (codec.py) needs the mirror change in mini.js, a spec update in SPEC.md, and a fixture that exercises it. Error codes are part of the public contract; do not renumber them.

Benchmark and validation#

Please report tokenizer, corpus, serializers and baseline for any new number. Keep raw model outputs under generative/raw/ so every figure stays traceable. TOON must be produced with the vendored official encoder.

Code of conduct#

Be kind, precise and reproducible.