Engineering principles

These shape every change. They follow from where Lore runs: on machines you own, often left unattended, with nobody to restart a process that has stopped.

1. Engineer for performance

Avoid unnecessary buffer copies, serialization, and allocations on the hot path.

2. Engineer for correctness by construction

Choose data structures and process ordering that make correctness easy to reason about, rather than correctness you have to check for.

3. Engineer for simplicity

Avoid object-oriented and trait-heavy patterns in business logic. Prefer C-style functions plus POD data.

4. Engineer for determinism

Resource costs should be known and bounded for every process. A client must not be able to grow resource use without limit — memory above all.

5. Engineer for fault isolation

One key, file, store, or peer failing must fail locally and cleanly. Nothing a single client does may take down the server or another client's connection.

6. Engineer for observability

A problem is diagnosed from telemetry that was already emitted — you cannot go back and add a log line. Keep it free on the hot path: never format or allocate for a message that may be discarded (lore_trace! compiles away without the trace_log feature), and aggregate per-item detail into a single report. See logging.md.