tc-value

Borrowed ToStream encoding delegates through native values without cloning strings or tuple trees. Byte values retain shared ownership of their payload; owned and borrowed encoding produce the same representation.

tc-value owns TinyChain's canonical scalar value vocabulary. It is independent of host state, transactions, collections, and transport adapters.

Values

Value is a plain enum with six variants:

• None
• Bytes(Arc<[u8]>)
• Link
• Number (including booleans)
• String
• Tuple

Maps belong to the IR/state collection structure rather than Value. Booleans use Number::Bool. Match variants directly and construct them directly or through typed conversions. Tuples own ordinary Vec<Value> children.

ValueType::Number(NumberType) retains the numerical type reported by Value::class(). Type declarations use accepts for membership: generic Number accepts every number, a generic numerical family accepts its members, and a concrete type requires an exact match. Schema validation never coerces values.

Codecs and Scalar/State-to-Value conversions accept at most 64 nested Value tuples. Conversions include embedded Values when checking the resulting depth, before constructing a tuple tree. Trusted native constructors must respect this contract: cloning, comparison, hashing, formatting, size accounting, and destruction use ordinary recursive enum operations. Scalar and State retain their own independent ownership and execution mechanisms.

Each variant has its canonical type URI, size accounting, collation, conversions, semantic traversal, and symmetric destream codec. Bytes are an ordinary bounded value and are used at real byte boundaries such as raw WASM installation; they are not a package or server-specific payload.

Plain literals use their natural wire form where one exists. Typed values use the canonical /state/scalar/value/... representation required for an unambiguous round trip. Readers accept the form emitted by writers; this crate does not maintain compatibility envelopes. As in v1, booleans, integers, and floats encode as bare literals. Complex numbers carry their numerical type path so they remain distinct from tuples. Explicit numeric tags request conversion to the declared type; ordinary literals do not need tags. Text codecs may infer a different integer width or signedness without changing the numerical value.

cargo test --all-targets --all-features

Private unit-test implementations live in tests/unit/, included by conditional module declarations in src. Module identities and private access are preserved; these files do not introduce separate integration-test targets.

GetSize measures actual retained storage, including container capacity and link allocations. Persistence adapters decode values before cache admission; this crate retains structural decoding limits rather than predicting allocation.

Canonical decoding retains one construction frame per open tuple and rejects a 65th tuple before constructing it. Primitive encoding delegates directly to the native variant; only tuples use codec-local iterative traversal. Both preserve wire representations. Errors and cancellation release unfinished values through ordinary Rust ownership. Construction and encoding cursor vectors reserve fallibly; infallible Rust traits retain ordinary allocation behavior.