The registry phase: what a thing is, and what it costs
22 July 2026 · Nabu news
Phase 39 is the housekeeping a tripled library earns. The registry’s 84 rows now declare what they are: 78 upstream sources, 4 owner-written shelves, 2 feature modules — and the status board groups them honestly, fuses enablement with sync cadence, and shows upstream freshness from real probe data. It paid for itself on its first render, flagging both Perseus shelves as behind upstream.
The engine work found two named culprits. Aozora’s 49-minute load was
seventeen thousand unzip subprocesses — replaced by an in-process
reader, 146× faster at fixture scale. And the Chinese shelf’s
slowdown traced to a Ruby standard-library quirk: String#tr
rebuilds its 6,050-entry translation table on every call, so every
passage of 13 million paid the setup; the precompiled replacement is
325× faster with byte-identical output. Rebuild stamps also became
language-aware — a Japanese fold tweak now dirties Japanese shelves,
not all 84 rows — with an owner-gated blessing tool so the formula
change itself costs nothing.
The aftercare closed honest gaps. A from-scratch rebuild had quietly minted one URN three times: three distinct volumes of Diodorus Siculus sharing a reused catalog number — now disambiguated, with collisions loud forever after. All 1,191 quarantined Aozora works turned out to be a single class — plain-text files predating the header convention — and parse again under their censused legacy shape; 85% of the remaining rare-glyph boxes resolve through the JIS standard table they always carried. The character ladder’s composition rung now draws 244 unencoded glyphs by their own recipes (⿰口斗), refusing everything it cannot prove. Numbers as of 2026-07-22; the recovering re-syncs are owner-scheduled.