Conformance test harness (RSpec) — KEYSTONE

[bradgessler]

The protocol test harness. Built before the client or any server. Protocol-level TDD.

• Language-neutral golden vector corpus (msgpack/JSON/YAML data, not code).
• RSpec black-box peer + interop orchestrator (I/O-bound; Ruby is fine and Brad's wheelhouse).
• Each impl gets a thin (~100-line) native runner to drive its own sans-IO core against the corpus.
• Two-tier (SQLite/TH3): spec + "starter" corpus OPEN so polyglot/community impls can self-test; exhaustive adversarial/fuzz/security harness CLOSED (the moat).
• Build internal + fast now, but accurate/precise: determinism (seeded IDs, no wall-clock, no sleep-based sync) is how we get fast AND no-flake.
• Rule: no protocol feature lands without a conformance vector.

Prior art to mine: Autobahn TestSuite, h2spec, gRPC interop, JSON Schema Test Suite.