Contributing

Contributions are welcome. go-ruby-marshal/marshal is built to a small set of non-negotiable rules — they are what keep the module pure-Go, correct, and byte-compatible with MRI. Please read these before opening a pull request.

Hard rules

• Build from source — no vendoring. Everything compiles from source. Do not reach for prebuilt binaries or vendored blobs as a shortcut; being able to compile from source is a guarantee of independence.
• 100% test coverage target, enforced in CI. New code ships with tests, and coverage is a CI gate. Fill the error branches (truncated input, unknown tags, unsupported versions), not just the happy path.
• All GitHub content in English. Issues, pull requests, commits, comments, and discussions are English-only.
• Differential testing against MRI. Correctness is defined by reference Ruby. Values are run through both Ruby's Marshal.dump and this encoder and the bytes are compared exactly — and bytes Ruby produced are decoded back and compared. "Byte-for-byte identical to MRI" is a tested property, not an approximation from memory.
• Pure Go, cgo disabled. The whole point is a single static binary with no C toolchain. Code must build with CGO_ENABLED=0. If a feature seems to need C, it needs a pure-Go path instead.

Workflow

1. Pick or open an issue describing the change.
2. Work test-first: add the differential / unit tests, then make them pass.
3. Run the full suite with coverage and confirm the gate is green.
4. Open a PR in English, referencing the issue.

Where things live

The encoder/decoder and the Value model are in github.com/go-ruby-marshal/marshal (dump.go, load.go, value.go). This documentation site is in github.com/go-ruby-marshal/docs. Start from the API and The Marshal format to find the right place for your change.