Skip to content

feat(png): measure the encoder end to end, then move what it exposed - #485

Open
justin13888 wants to merge 44 commits into
masterfrom
feat/224-png-encoder-efficiency
Open

feat(png): measure the encoder end to end, then move what it exposed#485
justin13888 wants to merge 44 commits into
masterfrom
feat/224-png-encoder-efficiency

Conversation

@justin13888

@justin13888 justin13888 commented Sep 1, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Collaborator

Closes #224.

gamut-png was correct but unmeasured. Its README.md and STATUS.md both claimed "output size
is benchmarked against libpng at maximum compression"
— and no code did either. It was one of
the few codec crates with no benches/ directory, and the encoder's only observable output was a
total byte count.

This measures every stage, records the baseline where a future change can be diffed against it,
turns the size claim into a gate, and then moves every axis the measurement exposed.

Result

gamut is smaller than libpng-9 on every corpus row, and the two hot loops got 4–33×.

input before after libpng-9 bpp
gradient_rgb8 2 272 1 562 2 393 −34.7% 0.191
photo_rgb8 20 293 19 570 27 467 −28.8% 2.389
noise_rgb8 196 983 196 983 197 280 −0.2% 24.046
grey_as_rgb8 370 368 566 −35.0% 0.045
palette64_rgba8 715 726 1 102 −34.1% 0.089
sprite_rgba8 (+cleanup) 3 729 2 235 3 889 −4.1% 0.455
flat_rgba8 103 103 664 −84.5% 0.013
tiny_rgb8 135 119 138 −13.8% 3.719
stage before after
crc32 420.8 MB/s 8.996 GB/s 21×
filter_image / None 497.9 MB/s 16.26 GB/s 33×
filter_image / Fixed(Paeth) 277.1 MB/s 1.202 GB/s 4.3×
filter_image / MinSumAbs 46.7 MB/s 265.8 MB/s 5.7×

Output is byte-identical across the speed work. No unsafe in any gamut crate.

Measurement first

Commits 1–4 build the harness; every later commit quotes its own before/after from it. That
ordering is why this is one PR.

  1. gamut_png::deconstruct — types every byte of any PNG and reports bpp, the DEFLATE
    stage's ratio in isolation, framing overhead, and the per-scanline filter histogram. Works on
    libpng's and oxipng's files, which is what makes the comparison a measurement rather than two
    encoders' self-reports. Verified on libpng's own interlaced pngtest.png, 18 chunk types
    including five this crate doesn't recognise.
  2. test-support stage seam — re-exports only, no wrapper bodies, so no coverage regions and
    no mutants (the rule .cargo/mutants.toml already states for crates/gamut/**).
  3. benches/encode.rs — size/bpp, where-the-bytes-went, and per-heuristic tables, plus
    per-stage throughput. Every column read back through deconstruct.
  4. tests/size_contract.rs — the gate. Per-case budgets each carrying a written justification.

Three findings the measurement produced

The cost model was comparing the wrong thing. reduce::analyze8 chose by raw size, which
can't predict compressed size when one candidate's bytes are incompressible and the other's
aren't. palette64_rgba8's PLTE+tRNS is a flat 273 bytes DEFLATE can't touch, so gamut lost
to libpng at 128×128 and won at 256×256. Two independent witnesses — the second appeared when
cleanup made the sprite palettisable, turning a 30% win into a 23% regression.
write_reduced_or_native now encodes both candidates and keeps the smaller, as BruteForce
already does for filters. No tuned constant.

A colour key is worth ~7–9%, not 25%. Dropping the alpha channel removes 25% of the samples,
but that plane is usually the most compressible one in the image. And it only pays on a
contiguous transparent region: with transparency scattered, RGB+tRNS measured 14 886 bytes
against plain RGBA's 14 319
and the race correctly refused it.

Entropy is never the unique winner. Bigrams wins four corpus rows by 22–32%, MinSumAbs three
by 5–6%, and Entropy none — it beats MinSumAbs twice but loses to Bigrams both times. Recorded as
a negative result in STATUS.md per docs/benchmarking.md, and kept out of the brute-force set
where it would cost a filter pass and a DEFLATE for nothing.

Worth a reviewer's attention

  • A fourth finding, from a merge review. with_transparent_cleanup could make files larger:
    on palette64_rgba8, cleaning measured −2.3% at 32×32, +10.7% at 128×128 and −5.2% at
    256×256, with both candidates on the same colour type throughout. Cleaning is a transform, not
    a reduction — it rewrites bytes DEFLATE was already compressing, and where the invisible pixels
    carry structure rather than noise, destroying it costs more than the collapsed palette saves.
    This is the same failure the cost model had, so it takes the same fix: cleaned_or_plain encodes
    both and keeps the smaller. The knob now means "clean where it pays" and can never cost bytes,
    pinned by cleanup_never_costs_bytes_on_any_corpus_row.
  • A Critical defect, found and fixed. choose_by seeded best_score with u64::MAX and
    improved on a strict <, so a row whose five candidates all scored u64::MAX left best_bytes
    unwritten — and filter_image reuses that buffer across scanlines. Score::Entropy hit the
    sentinel whenever no byte repeated, which is ordinary for narrow images: a 2×1 Gray8 [1,3]
    encoded to a PNG whose IDAT is shorter than its image, and a 2×2 [0,0,0,1] to a valid PNG
    decoding to [0,0,0,0]. Fixed twice over — Option<u64> makes choose_by total whatever any
    scorer returns, and the entropy score is restated as Σ c·log2(n/c), bounded by 8n·256, so it
    cannot reach a sentinel at all. The restatement is ranking-equivalent: the per-heuristic table
    re-measures byte-identically.
  • Two High findings in deconstruct. Per-chunk-type stats accumulated by linear scan, and
    chunk types are four unvalidated bytes — one distinct type per 12 bytes of hostile input made the
    walk quadratic (4.8 MB → 40.9 s, reachable from gamut inspect). Now a hash index beside the
    first-appearance-ordered Vec. Separately, the filter-scan budget bounded the filtered stream
    while claiming to match the decoder's decoded budget; the two differ by one byte per scanline,
    so a 4096×4096 RGBA8 image that decodes fine was reported damaged. ihdr::native_bytes is now
    the single definition both sides read, so the claim holds by construction.
  • filters is now a typed FilterScan. Option<FilterHistogram> collapsed four causes into
    one None, and is_intact() counted "we declined to measure" as damage. SkippedFilterScan
    names the reason; only OverBudget is not damage.
  • Two oracle tests changed. Both pinned a colour type as a proxy for "a reduction happened",
    which the race decouples. On 32×32 fixtures the unreduced stream genuinely wins, so the old
    expectations were asserting the defect. The relaxed disjunction has since been tightened back to
    an exact pin — its COLOR_PALETTE arm was unreachable — and sub-byte indexed auto-reduce, which
    lost its only cover in that edit, is re-pinned by a new 192×192 four-colour case.
  • One byte-exact golden re-captured. rgb8_best_bruteforce's IDAT went 36 → 21 bytes when
    Bigrams joined the candidate set. That pin proves the codec-abi seam is inert, not that the
    encoder is frozen; the change is documented in place, because an encoder change making output
    larger would look identical there and would be a regression.
  • Mutation survivors closed. Every survivor is killed by a named test or designed out — the
    bigram index is read as one u16::from_be_bytes, leaving no operator to mutate, and the entropy
    filter's c > 0 follows from the restated algebra. No .cargo/mutants.toml exclusions are
    added.
  • Public API, beyond the codestream. FilterScan/SkippedFilterScan and
    PngReport::native_bytes() are new exports. PngHeader gains PartialEq, Eq — required
    transitively by PngReport's own derives, not incidental. choose_min_sum_abs is removed: it
    was dead in the shipped crate and a wrapper body in a seam whose module doc forbids them, and its
    reported 4.5× measured a per-scanline 9 KiB allocation the encoder never performs.

Axis scorecard

# axis state
1 Filter selection MinSumAbs + Entropy + Bigrams, seven brute-force candidates. Per-line trial deflate, AtomicMin pruning and a two-tier cheap trial remain — #480
2 DEFLATE quality ~2% behind zopfli, honestly documented. #478, #479
3 Smallest lawful representation donecloses #481
4 Palette optimization ordering done (refs #482, which stays open), now pinned by a fixture whose discovery order differs from its sorted order; modified-Zeng and caller-path cleanup remain
5 Cleaning invisible data done — wired into the 16-bit layouts too, and raced rather than assumed, so it can never cost bytes
6 Metadata hygiene no policy — #483
7 Interlacing correctly none
8 Effort / speed / determinism hot loops accelerated; parallelism and a composed dial remain — #484
9 Correctness / robustness covered

Docs

docs/benchmarking.md is new because benchmarks had no normative owner — docs/testing.md
disclaimed them by name and docs/README.md makes anything unlisted non-binding. Both updated to
match. gamut inspect gains PNG so the accounting is reachable without writing Rust, and the root
README.md task table gains the mise run bench / bench-test rows that document points at.
docs/benchmarking.md's counter rule gains a row for byte-oriented pipeline stages, which is
what the new per-stage benches are; docs/testing.md's authority table now names the size
contract on the gamut-png row.

Validation

mise run test · fmt-check · lint · check-tests · check-commits · check-ffi-features ·
check-release-deps — green locally, lint clean in both feature configurations.

Depends on nothing. #477 (the unsafe policy) is independent — nothing here needed it, which
is itself a finding: since Rust 1.87, #[target_feature] on safe fns means most SIMD needs no
unsafe, and crc32fast keeps its own.


Decisions taken

A follow-up pass (commits 7593fe5..332af8d) acted on a merge review. No human has approved
this section
— it is a record to read, amend, or revert, not an approval that was collected.
Each entry names the fork, what was taken, what was rejected and why, and the edit that reverses it.

1. gamut inspect exited 0 on a file it never read.
is_intact() includes !filters.is_damage(), and an over-budget skip is not damage — so at the
decoder's 64 MiB budget, every PNG past 4096×4096 RGBA8 was reported intact: yes and exited 0
whatever its IDAT held. Chunk CRCs do not cover this; a corrupt-but-CRC-valid IDAT is precisely the
damage the module doc says only the scan can see.
Taken: raise the walk's budget here to 1 GiB (past any real image) and gate the exit on a new
PngReport::is_verified() = is_intact() + the scan ran. intact: is still printed and still
true. Rejected: leaving exit 0 (the tool advertises itself as an archival gate, so "did not look"
must not read as "looked and found nothing"); exit 1 on any skip (fails sound very large PNGs);
a third exit code (only PNG could produce it, breaking the deliberate TIFF/DNG symmetry).
Measured: a 4100×4100 RGBA8 image now counts all 4100 scanlines and exits 0; the same image with
its IDAT corrupted under a valid CRC now exits 1. Both exited 0 before.
Reverses: in inspect.rs, gate on report.is_intact() and drop the limits binding.

2. deconstruct hard-coded the decoder's budget.
So "a report never allocates more than a decode would" held only against a default-configured
decoder, while PngDecoder lets a caller change its own.
Taken: DeconstructLimits + deconstruct_with_limits, with builder methods mirroring
PngDecoder::with_max_image_bytes. deconstruct keeps its signature and its defaults.
Rejected: a bare usize parameter (no room for the second ceiling below); struct-literal
construction (#[non_exhaustive] forbids it across crates, which is why the builders exist).
Reverses: delete the type and inline DEFAULT_MAX_IMAGE_BYTES at scan_filters.

3. Nothing capped the chunk count.
A chunk costs 12 input bytes and buys a Segment — measured ~11× amplification (48 MB input →
522 MB RSS) — in a crate that caps every other attacker-chosen quantity.
Taken: max_chunks, default 2²⁰; past it the walk returns InvalidInput. A PNG at the ceiling
carries ≥12 MiB of pure framing, which no real file does.
Rejected: no cap (the growth being linear is not a defence when the constant is 11×); truncating
the walk instead of erroring (it would break the every-byte tiling law, which is the report's
headline invariant).
Reverses: drop the segments.len() > limits.max_chunks check.

4. crc32fast had no approval on record.the user approved this dependency explicitly.
Recorded in AGENTS.md where the "maintainer-approved external crates" rule lives.
Reverses: revert 332af8d.

5. FilterStrategy was public, non-sealed, and gained two variants.
That breaks a downstream exhaustive match. At 0.1.0 a minor bump is Cargo's breaking slot, so
nothing breaks today — and #[non_exhaustive] is free now and not after 1.0.
Taken: seal it; it is already the house style (212 uses in-workspace).
Rejected: leaving it open and recording a post-1.0 posture — the fix costs nothing now.
Reverses: drop the attribute.

6. Closes #482 closed an issue this PR leaves two-thirds undone.
#482 names palette ordering (done here), encode_indexed8 caller-path dedupe/unused-entry
removal/depth re-derivation, and PngPalette::trns() trimming on the caller path. The last two are
untouched, as the scorecard itself says.
Taken: demote to refs #482 so the issue stays open carrying its remainder. No new issue is
filed, because #482 already tracks exactly that scope — a second one would duplicate it.
Rejected: implementing the caller path (well beyond this PR's scope); closing it and filing the
remainder (needlessly splits one tracked axis in two).
Reverses: restore closes #482 in the axis-4 row.

Findings fixed alongside

  • Interlaced overflow. pass_stats bailed out only per pass while adam7::expected_stream_len
    also fails on the seven-pass sum, so a header whose passes each fit usize reported seven passes
    against a filtered_len saturated to 0 — printed as a 0.0% ratio.
  • The bigram scorer wiped 8 KiB per candidate — 40 KiB of memset per scanline, independent of
    row length. It now clears only the words the row dirtied. Byte-identical output.
  • A palette sort key (c[3] == 255) that is monotone in the component after it and so can
    never change the order.
  • Test coverage: SkippedFilterScan::UndefinedFilterCode had no fixture driving scan_filters
    into it; the GrayKeyed member of carries_chunks had no case where the key loses. Both are
    now pinned, the second at a measured 88-vs-97 bytes.
  • the_deflate_stage_accounts_for_the_residual_gap never isolated DEFLATE — same colour type
    makes filtered_len equal, not the filtered bytes, since the two encoders choose different
    filters. Renamed to what it asserts.
  • Documentation corrected against measurement: the cost-model table's gamut column matched
    the encoder at no size (451/511/564/715 against a measured 364/465/563/726), and its flat
    "273-byte PLTE+tRNS" was a pre-ordering figure — this branch's own ordering made it 224 — that
    was also the written justification for the palette64_rgba8 budget. The bench can now print the
    tie STATUS.md recorded, and the "smaller on every row" claim is qualified on the incompressible
    row, which is the one budget deliberately set above parity.

Repair pass (97567f5)

The incremental mutation gate rejected the first push with five survivors, all in the code these
commits added
— test gaps, not code defects, and each fixed by a test rather than by weakening
anything:

  • FilterScan::is_counted and PngReport::is_verified were pinned only by their negative cases.
    An over-budget file satisfies every assertion those made even with both predicates hardcoded
    false, so the verdict the CLI gate depends on could always have said no.
  • DeconstructLimits::with_max_image_bytes was never exercised — the ceiling test only ever set
    max_chunks — so replacing the setter with Default::default() changed nothing.
  • The chunk ceiling was asserted far past the boundary (11 segments against a limit of 4), where
    >, >= and == all refuse alike. It now asserts the exact count: a file of precisely the
    ceiling's size is admitted, one more is refused.

Each of the five was re-applied by hand against the suite to confirm it now fails, rather than
assuming a new test was sufficient.

Validation

mise run test (whole workspace, 0 failed) · fmt-check · lint · check-tests ·
check-ffi-features · check-release-deps · convco check — all green locally.

CI green at 97567f5: Format & Metadata, Clippy & Doctests, Coverage (test gate), and all four
Incremental (PR diff) mutation shards. Full workspace is skipped on pull requests by design and
is informational only.

Not run: check-cross and check-msrv, which the Extended workflow runs post-merge on master by
design — worth knowing because this branch adds a runtime dependency (crc32fast, MSRV 1.63
against the workspace's 1.92) and a new bench, which CI compiles here but first executes on
master.

`gamut_png::deconstruct` classifies every byte of a PNG into a typed
`Segment` and reports the figures an encoder-efficiency comparison is built
from: bits per pixel, what the DEFLATE stage achieved in isolation, how many
bytes went to chunk framing, and which scanline filter each row chose.

It works on any PNG, whichever encoder wrote it, which is the point: the same
numbers can be read off libpng's, oxipng's or zopflipng's output and compared
directly. Issue #224 asks for BPP efficiency and parity, and neither is
answerable from a total byte count alone -- a size difference has to be
attributable to a stage before it can be acted on.

Shape follows `gamut_tiff::deconstruct` / `gamut_dng::deconstruct` for the
entry point and verdict method, and `gamut_isobmff::segments` for the
`Segment { range, kind }` tiling. gamut-png does not and must not depend on
gamut-isobmff, and that walk is box-structured anyway, so PNG needs its own --
but the names are deliberately identical.

Owned rather than borrowed, unlike the ISOBMFF one. Its segments borrow
because they are the only route to an unknown box's bytes; PNG already has
`metadata()` for payloads, so the report carries only counts and ranges and
can be `Clone + PartialEq + Eq` and stored across a bench corpus without
pinning every input buffer alive.

Deliberately more tolerant than `metadata()`, which rejects an unknown
critical chunk: a measurement tool that refuses to measure is useless. Unknown
chunks of either criticality, CRC mismatches, a missing IEND, trailing bytes
and a truncated tail are reported, not errored -- `gamut_dng::deconstruct`'s
contract verbatim. Only a file with no header to report on fails.

The filter histogram is the one part that costs work and can fail, so it is
`Option`. The inflation bound needs no policy: PNG's filtered length is
*exactly* determined by IHDR, so `max_out` is that length and a zlib bomb
cannot exceed it by a byte; a hostile IHDR is handled by declining to inflate
past the decoder's existing 64 MiB image budget. Everything else in the report
comes from framing and IHDR, so it survives a corrupt, truncated or oversized
stream.

`RawChunk` gains its own `range`, taken from the offset `ChunkReader` already
advances, so byte accounting cannot drift from framing arithmetic; the reader
gains an `offset()` so a caller can bound a malformed tail. `PngHeader` gains
`PartialEq, Eq` -- additive, and a plain `Copy` header should be comparable.

Tests are the byte-accounting law, the family `docs/testing.md` names after
`gamut-avif`/`gamut-heic`'s `tests/accounting.rs`. `assert_covers` re-derives
the tiling rather than trusting `is_fully_classified`, which is the thing
under test. Fixtures come from libpng wherever the claim is about reading a
foreign file: interlaced streams, forced filters and sub-byte depths are all
things `PngEncoder` cannot write, and a histogram checked against gamut's own
filter choice would be self-consistent rather than correct.

Two findings from writing them, both recorded in the code:

  * A trailer counts against `is_intact` even though §13.2 lets a decoder
    ignore trailing bytes. `bits_per_pixel` divides the whole file by the
    pixel count, so bytes outside the datastream inflate the headline figure
    and a size comparison has to know they are there.

  * The CRC fixture corrupts a stored CRC, not a payload. Corrupting IHDR's
    payload makes the header unparsable, which is a hard error and a
    different claim entirely.

Refs #224
A `benches/` target compiles as a separate crate, so it can only reach `pub`
items -- and every encoder stage is crate-private. Timing them one at a time
needs a seam.

`src/stages.rs` is that seam, and it is re-exports and nothing else. No
wrapper bodies: a wrapper would be an executable line no gate ever runs, since
bench targets carry `test = false` and neither `cargo test`, `cargo llvm-cov`
nor `cargo mutants` reach them. It would drag the coverage floor and generate
mutants no test could kill. `.cargo/mutants.toml` already states the rule this
follows, in its `crates/gamut/**` entry: "pure feature-gated re-exports (no
function bodies), so it carries no logic of its own to mutate." So this needs
no new exclusion.

The stage items become `pub` inside their still-private modules, which changes
no effective visibility -- a `pub` item in a private module is unreachable.
With the feature off the crate's public API is byte-identical to before.

`test-support` follows the convention gamut-core, gamut-ifd and gamut-tonemap
use for their `invariants` modules: additive, `doc(hidden)`, no SemVer
guarantee, and never enabled by the `gamut` umbrella, so the shipped surface
and `mise run check-ffi-features` are unaffected (both verified).

`Crc32::new` gains an `expect(clippy::new_without_default)` rather than a
`Default` impl. Nothing in the crate would call such an impl, so it would be
an uncovered region and an unkillable mutant -- dead delegation added only to
satisfy a lint.

Refs #224
gamut-png was one of the few codec crates with no `benches/` directory, and
both `README.md` and `STATUS.md` claimed "output size is benchmarked against
libpng at maximum compression" -- a claim no code backed. This is that
benchmark.

Two tables print before the divan run, following gamut-deflate's and
gamut-dng's shape: output size and bits-per-pixel against libpng at zlib
level 9, then where the bytes went stage by stage. Every column of both comes
from `gamut_png::deconstruct` reading the encoded file back, so the libpng
column is a like-for-like measurement rather than two encoders' self-reports,
and a size difference can be attributed to filtering, to the colour-type
choice, or to DEFLATE.

libpng gets the *same source layout* gamut gets, with no `palette` option even
for palettisable rows -- handing it a palette would hand it gamut's own
reduction and the comparison would stop measuring anything. Its default
adaptive filtering is left alone: that is the honest baseline.

The measured baseline, recorded here so the next change has something to be
judged against (one machine; read the ratios, not the times):

    input                raw   default      best  libpng-9  best/lp9
    gradient_rgb8     196608      2831      2272      2393     -5.1%
    photo_rgb8        196608     29885     20293     27467    -26.1%
    noise_rgb8        196608    196983    196983    197280     -0.2%
    grey_as_rgb8      196608       721       370       566    -34.6%
    palette64_rgba8   262144      1274       715      1102    -35.1%
    sprite_rgba8      262144      4181      3729      3889     -4.1%
    flat_rgba8        262144       821       103       664    -84.5%
    tiny_rgb8            768       136       135       138     -2.2%

gamut is smaller than libpng-9 on every row. The stage table shows why, and
where it is not: `sprite_rgba8` -- binary alpha over invisible colour noise --
stays TruecolorAlpha where the reduce cascade should reach it, which is
exactly the tRNS-colour-key and dirty-alpha gaps this issue is about.

Corpus notes, both of which cost a fixture rewrite to get right:

  * 256x256 is the floor that means anything. RGB at that size is 192 KiB,
    roughly six times the 32 KiB DEFLATE window, so LZ77 match behaviour is
    real; a 64x64 image fits *inside* the window and would flatter both
    encoders equally.

  * The "incompressible" row is a full avalanche mix, not the plain
    `i * 2654435761 >> 24` gamut-deflate's bench uses. Over a dense index that
    top byte changes only once every few hundred `i`, so the first version of
    this row compressed 97x and measured nothing at all. It now expands
    slightly, as any lossless codec must on random data.

Per-stage rows sit behind `test-support` and are skipped without it, so plain
`cargo bench -p gamut-png` and `mise run bench` still work. No
`required-features` on the target: `mise run bench` passes no features, and
the whole bench would silently never run.

Refs #224, #149
`README.md` and `STATUS.md` have long claimed "output size is benchmarked
against libpng at maximum compression". The previous commit prints that
comparison, but a bench asserts nothing and does not run in the per-PR gate.
This makes the claim enforceable: a regression in the crate's reason to exist
fails the build, the same mechanism gamut-deflate's ratio contract and
gamut-webp/tests/effort.rs use.

Every budget carries its own written justification naming the stage that
spends the bytes, in the shape of gamut-cmm's precision-budget table, and
records what the row measured when the budget was set so drift shows up in
review rather than as a surprise red build. Measured at 128x128 -- half the
bench's side, so this stays fast enough for the coverage and mutation lanes.

    row                gamut  libpng-9  ratio  budget
    gradient_rgb8        703       749  0.939    0.98
    photo_rgb8          5843      7768  0.752    0.85
    noise_rgb8         49348     49435  0.998    1.01
    grey_as_rgb8         146       251  0.582    0.70
    flat_rgba8            96       299  0.321    0.45
    sprite_rgba8        1669      1733  0.963    1.00
    palette64_rgba8      451       405  1.114    1.15

The last row is the finding, and the budget records it rather than hiding it.
gamut auto-palettises where libpng writes RGBA: at 256x256 that wins by 35%,
at 128x128 it loses by 11%. Measured with `deconstruct` across four sizes:

    side   gamut  IDAT  PLTE+tRNS  libpng-9
     128     451   121        273       405
     160     511   181        273       572
     192     564   234        273       707
     256     715   385        273      1102

The cause is not that `reduce::analyze8` ignores the palette chunks -- it
counts them, estimating 280 bytes against an actual 273. It is that the model
compares *raw* sizes, and raw size does not predict compressed size when one
candidate's bytes are incompressible and the other's are not. Those 273 bytes
survive DEFLATE intact while the RGBA alternative compresses roughly 160x, so
the estimate sees 16 664 against 65 536 and picks palette by a 4x margin that
does not survive compression. The crossover sits near 160x160. Filed
separately; a cost model that weighs incompressible overhead against
compressible pixels is what tightens that budget.

Four tests, each failing for one reason: the budget table, a strictly-smaller
assertion for the rows that claim a structural win, an attribution test, and
determinism. The winning set is listed explicitly rather than derived from
`max_ratio < 1.0` -- a budget loosened past 1.0 during a regression would
otherwise drop out of that test silently, which is exactly when it should
fail. Not hypothetical: palette64 was in the derived set before it was
measured.

The attribution test is why `deconstruct` is a dependency here. Where both
encoders land on the same colour type and depth the filtered stream is
identical by construction, so comparing the *compressed* streams isolates
DEFLATE from filtering and from the colour-type choice.

The corpus moves to `tests/common/corpus.rs` and the bench includes it by
path. Budgets are only meaningful measured on the same pixels the table
reports, and two copies would drift invisibly -- a budget that no longer
describes the row it names.

libpng gets the same source layout with no palette hint and its own default
adaptive filtering. Handing it a palette would hand it gamut's reduction.

Refs #224
At `alpha == 0` the colour channels are invisible by definition, but the
source's bytes are still stored and still cost. `with_transparent_cleanup`
zeroes them. Off by default, and deliberately separate from
`with_auto_reduce`: every other reduction in this crate is exactly reversible,
and this one is only reversible in what you can see.

It pays three compounding ways -- transparent pixels become identical so a run
filters to zeros; `analyze8` keys its palette on the whole RGBA quad, so
invisible pixels that differ only in unseen colour stop costing an entry each;
and it is the precondition for a tRNS colour key, which needs one colour to
stand for "transparent".

One constant, not the neighbouring pixel's colour, and that was measured
rather than assumed. Inheriting the predecessor flattens a run just as well,
but leaves every invisible pixel a distinct RGBA quad, so the palette and tRNS
benefits both vanish: on a fixture alternating visible and invisible pixels it
collapsed nothing and saved exactly zero bytes (378 vs 378). Zeroing collapses
them to one entry.

Two halves to the claim, so two techniques. That nothing visible changes is
differential: libpng decodes both files and every pixel with non-zero alpha
must be byte-identical, with alpha itself identical everywhere. That it pays
is a size assertion against the same image encoded without it.

Measured, and the interaction is worth stating plainly -- on the 256x256
sprite this makes the file *larger*:

    side  clean  total  colour type      IDAT
      64  false    859  TruecolorAlpha    802
      64  true     817  Indexed/8         549
     128  false   1669  TruecolorAlpha   1612
     128  true    1925  Indexed/8        1477
     256  false   3729  TruecolorAlpha   3672
     256  true    4589  Indexed/8        3781

The cleanup is not what regresses: its IDAT is smaller at every size. What
happens is that collapsing the invisible colours drops the image under the
256-colour cliff, so `analyze8` now offers a palette -- and the raw-size cost
model then picks it, exactly as it wrongly picks it for `palette64_rgba8` in
the previous commit. Same defect, second independent witness, and cleaning
makes it reachable on more images. The next commit fixes the model; this one
would have been a regression shipped alone.

Refs #224
`reduce::analyze8` chooses by comparing **raw** sizes, and raw size does not
predict compressed size when one candidate's bytes are incompressible and the
other's are not. A palette carries PLTE (and often tRNS) that DEFLATE cannot
touch, while the pixels it replaces may compress by two orders of magnitude.

Two independent measurements from the previous commits:

  * `palette64_rgba8` at 128x128: PLTE + tRNS is a flat 273 bytes, the indexed
    pixel data compresses to 121, and the RGBA alternative compresses to 405
    in total. The estimate sees 16 664 against 65 536 and picks the palette by
    4x. Finished files: 451 against libpng-9's 405 -- the only corpus row
    where gamut lost.

  * The sprite, once transparent-colour cleanup collapses its invisible pixels
    under the 256-colour cliff, becomes palettisable and is then chosen at
    every size: 817 vs 859 at 64x64, but 1925 vs 1669 at 128 and 4589 vs 3729
    at 256.

Same defect, and cleaning made it reachable on more images.

Rather than guess a correction factor, `write_reduced_or_native` encodes both
candidates and keeps the smaller. That is exactly what
`FilterStrategy::BruteForce` already does for filters, it needs no tuned
constant, and it cannot be worse than either candidate alone. A tie keeps the
palette, which decodes with less work.

Only palette reductions pay for the second encode. Greyscale, alpha-drop and
16->8 demotion add no chunks, so for them the raw comparison is already sound
and the function returns immediately.

Measured after:

    row                        before   after
    palette64_rgba8 @128          451     390   (libpng-9: 405, now a win)
    sprite_rgba8 +clean @256     4589    2619   (uncleaned best: 3729)

The sprite is the striking one: cleanup was a 23% regression and is now a 30%
improvement, because the race stops the analysis's mistake from landing.

Two oracle tests changed, and the reason is worth stating rather than burying.
Both pinned a *colour type* as a proxy for "a reduction happened", and the
race decouples those: the analysis still offers a palette, the encoder now
declines it when it would cost bytes. On 32x32 fixtures with a handful of
repeating colours the unreduced stream genuinely wins, so the old expectations
were asserting the defect. They now assert the contract that matters -- the
pixels survive, and the smaller file is kept -- and a new
`a_palette_is_chosen_when_it_actually_wins` covers the other side of the race
at 192x192, where the fixed cost is amortised. Without it the palette encoding
path would only ever be exercised where it loses. The analysis contract itself
stays pinned by `reduce`'s own unit tests, which is where it belongs.

Refs #224
Both hot loops the new benchmark exposed, neither needing any `unsafe` in
gamut. Output is byte-identical: every row of the size table is unchanged, and
the oracle, determinism and size-contract suites all still pass. This buys
time, not bytes.

                          before        after
    crc32              420.8 MB/s   8.996 GB/s   21x
    filter_image None  497.9 MB/s   16.26 GB/s   33x
    filter_image Paeth 277.1 MB/s   1.202 GB/s  4.3x
    filter_image MSA    46.7 MB/s   265.8 MB/s  5.7x
    choose_min_sum_abs  68.0 MB/s   308.4 MB/s  4.5x

CRC-32 moves to `crc32fast`, which dispatches to PCLMULQDQ/AVX-512 on x86-64
and the `crc32` instructions on aarch64, with a table fallback elsewhere
including wasm32. Its `unsafe` stays inside that crate; gamut-png remains 100%
safe Rust, which is why this needed no policy change. The two existing unit
tests stay exactly as they were, now as a drift guard: they pin the polynomial
this module's doc claims, so a backend computing a different CRC-32 variant
fails here rather than silently producing files no decoder accepts.

The filter loops needed no dependency at all. Three structural pessimisations
were blocking the vectoriser, and removing them is most of the win:

  * The `i >= bpp` test choosing between a real left-neighbour and an implicit
    zero is loop-invariant. The row now splits into a `bpp`-long prologue
    where `a` and `c` are zero and a body where they are not. That collapses
    Sub to a copy in the prologue and, less obviously, Paeth to Up, because
    `paeth(0, b, 0) == b` for every `b` -- at `b == 0` all three distances tie
    and the spec's order picks `a`, which is also zero.
  * The body reads five equal-length subslices, so the bounds checks fold away
    instead of being re-proved per index.
  * The filter is matched once outside the loop instead of once per byte, and
    `out` is sized once instead of a capacity check per `push`.

Separately, `MinSumAbs` was filtering each scanline **six** times, not five:
`choose_min_sum_abs` computed all five candidates, returned only which one
won, and `filter_image` then recomputed exactly those bytes. It now hands back
the winning buffer, trading a `memcpy` per improvement for a full filter pass
per row.

`unfilter_row` is deliberately untouched. Forward filtering has no serial
dependency, so all five kernels vectorise; reconstruction reads
`row[i - bpp]` after writing it, so only `Up` would benefit and this is an
encoder-first crate.

Refs #224
…onvention

`gamut-png`'s STATUS gains an Efficiency section: the size table against
libpng-9, the throughput before/after, a per-axis scorecard of the nine things
a PNG encoder competes on, and the measured explanation of why the palette
choice is now a race rather than an estimate. Every number is reproduced by
`cargo bench -p gamut-png` and gated by `tests/size_contract.rs`.

Its README and STATUS both claimed "output size is benchmarked against libpng
at maximum compression" while no code did either. They now say what is true:
measured by the bench, enforced by the contract.

`docs/benchmarking.md` is new, and takes an owner for something that had none.
`docs/testing.md` disclaimed benchmarks by name, and `docs/README.md` makes
anything unlisted there "descriptive, not binding" -- so the conventions every
bench in the workspace already follows were binding on nobody. It is normative
for where a benchmark lives, what a size or ratio table must record, and where
a measured number is kept, and it hands the enforcement question back to
`testing.md` explicitly. The rule it turns on:

    A benchmark reports. A test asserts. Only the test can fail a build.

It also records what CI actually does now, which changed under this branch:
`mise run lint`'s `--all-targets` compiles every bench on every PR, and the
Extended lane's `mise run bench-test` runs each once. Neither gates a number,
and the document says why that is still open rather than implying benches are
ungated.

Both normative documents change here because `docs/README.md` requires it: a
`docs/` file that contradicts another is a change to both.

Seven follow-ups filed with their measured evidence rather than left as prose:

  #478  gamut-deflate: 8-byte-at-a-time longest_match -- the dominant cost of
        every encode in the workspace, safe Rust, byte-identical output
  #479  gamut-deflate: relax each length at its own nearest distance
  #480  gamut-png: entropy and bigram heuristics, pruned two-tier trials
  #481  gamut-png: tRNS colour key for grey and truecolour
  #482  gamut-png: palette ordering and caller-supplied palette cleanup
  #483  gamut-png: metadata policy, and the CLI's silent drop
  #484  gamut-png: parallel filter trials, and a composed effort dial

Refs #224
CI's diff-scoped mutation run surfaced ten survivors across the four shards.
None was noise: each one names a claim the new code makes that nothing
actually checked.

Three needed only a fixture that could tell the difference:

  * `is_fully_classified`'s `||` and its whole body. `deconstruct` cannot
    produce a malformed tiling -- it is correct by construction -- so every
    negative case has to be built by hand. Inline tests now assemble reports
    with a gap, an empty segment, an overlap, a late start and an early end,
    each isolating one half of the predicate.

  * `ChunkStats`'s `count += 1` and `payload_bytes += len`. Every fixture
    carried at most one chunk of each type, so the accumulate arm never ran
    and `count` sat at the 1 it is inserted with. Two tests now cover it: a
    hand-built file with two `tEXt` chunks, and a real multi-IDAT encode that
    also ties the chunk table back to `idat_compressed`.

  * `filter_histogram`'s `at += 1 + row_bytes`. Mutated to `*=` the cursor
    stays at 0 and every row's filter byte is read from the same offset --
    indistinguishable while every histogram test forced a *single* filter for
    the whole image, because both report `height` of it. A fixture whose rows
    genuinely choose differently now pins that at least two buckets are
    non-empty.

Three were untestable where they stood, and moved rather than being papered
over:

  * The inflation budget (`filtered_len == 0 || filtered_len > MAX`). Reaching
    the boundary through `deconstruct` would need a real 64 MiB stream either
    side of the cap, and a hostile IHDR cannot separate `>` from `>=` or `==`
    because an over-budget file is rejected a second time when the inflated
    length fails to match. Now `within_inflation_budget`, tested at 0, 1, the
    cap and one past it.

  * The palette-vs-native tie-break. Engineering two encodings of one image to
    land on exactly equal lengths is not something a fixture can do reliably,
    so `prefers_native` carries the comparison and a unit test pins the
    documented rule: a tie keeps the palette.

  * `clean_transparent`'s "is there anything to do" check. Mutated to `!=` it
    returns `Some(unchanged copy)` for a fully opaque image instead of `None`,
    which the encoder cannot see -- the bytes are identical either way. The
    distinction is that the encoder must be able to tell "no work" from "work
    that changed nothing", or it allocates a whole image for nothing, so the
    test is on the function.

And one was an equivalent mutant, removed rather than tested: the
`start < png.len()` guard before pushing a `Truncated` segment can never be
false, because `next_chunk` returns `Ok(None)` when nothing is left and only
errors with bytes remaining. It was dead code wearing a safety net's clothes;
a `debug_assert` records why.

Refs #224
`gamut inspect` already answered "did every byte get accounted for?" for TIFF
and DNG. For PNG the same walk answers a second question -- where did the
bytes go? -- which is what makes an encoder comparison possible from the
command line, on files this crate did not write.

PNG prints on its own path rather than being flattened into `Summary`. It has
no IFD tree and no tag vocabulary, but it carries compression figures the
others have no equivalent for, and forcing both through one shape would lose
the half that matters.

Verified end to end on libpng's own `pngtest.png` -- Adam7 interlaced, 18
chunk types including five this crate does not recognise (`sTER`, `vpAg`,
`oFFs`, `pCAL`, `sCAL`):

    image:      91x69 TruecolorAlpha depth 8, Adam7 interlaced
    size:       8759 bytes (11.160 bits/pixel)
    IDAT:       8119 bytes compressed from 25247 filtered (32.2%)
    overhead:   640 bytes, of which 216 is chunk framing
    filters:    None 21 / Sub 15 / Up 52 / Average 10 / Paeth 33 (131 scanlines)
    classified: yes
    intact:     yes

Every byte of a foreign file classified, and the filter distribution counted
across seven Adam7 passes. Truncating it to 4000 bytes reports
`truncated from offset 342 (3658 bytes)`, keeps every framing- and
IHDR-derived figure, drops only the histogram, and exits non-zero.

`Crc32::new`'s lint suppression changes from `expect` to `allow`, and the
reason is worth recording: `clippy::new_without_default` only fires when
`test-support` re-exports the type through `crate::stages`, so an `expect` is
*unfulfilled* in a default-feature build and fails there instead. That is
`expect` working correctly -- it caught its own obsolescence in one of two
configurations -- but a feature-dependent lint wants `allow`.

Refs #224
The one lawful PNG representation this encoder could not write. The crate said
so itself, at `decoder.rs:1327`: "the encoder cannot write interlaced files or
greyscale/truecolour tRNS colour keys". The decoder has always read them, so
only the encoder half was missing.

Three conditions, all necessary, because §11.3.2.1 gives a decoder exactly one
transparent colour and not a mask: every alpha is 0 or 255; at least one pixel
is transparent; and every transparent pixel shares one colour that no opaque
pixel uses. That last one is why `with_transparent_cleanup` pairs with this --
it collapses every invisible pixel to one colour, which is precisely what a
key needs.

Two passes, not one: the candidate is unknown until the first transparent
pixel is seen, so proving no *earlier* opaque pixel used it needs a second
look. The second only runs once the first has found a candidate.

The measurement changed the design twice, and both are recorded in the code
because neither is guessable:

  * **It is worth ~7-9%, not the 25% the raw-byte arithmetic suggests.**
    Dropping a channel removes 25% of the samples, but the alpha plane is
    usually the most compressible plane in the image, so most of that is
    already free. On a 128x128 sprite: 863 bytes keyed against 926 plain.

  * **Only on a contiguous transparent region.** With the transparency
    scattered by a hash instead, the invisible colour interleaves with the
    visible gradient and wrecks the RGB channels' compressibility: `RGB+tRNS`
    came out at 14 886 bytes against plain RGBA's 14 319, and the race
    correctly declined the key. The first version of the fixture here was
    scattered, and the tests failed until the shape matched what real sprites
    and icons actually look like.

So keyed encodings join `Indexed` in `write_reduced_or_native`'s race rather
than being taken on the estimate. A `tRNS` chunk is incompressible in exactly
the way a `PLTE` is, and the same raw-size blind spot applies: at 32x32 and
64x64 the analysis offers a key and the race is right to refuse it.

Tests go through libpng in every case rather than round-tripping gamut against
itself: gamut writes the key and libpng interprets it, so a round trip could
agree on a wrong convention and prove nothing. That includes pinning the
payload bytes, since §11.3.2.1 wants three *16-bit big-endian* samples and a
decoder reading them as three bytes would key on the wrong colour.

Refs #224. Closes #481.
Axis 3 moves to done, with the measured figure rather than the raw-byte
one: ~7-9% on a contiguous transparent region, because the alpha plane a key
removes is usually the most compressible plane in the image.

Refs #224
Palette index order is not free. It decides the `tRNS` chunk's length, and it
decides what the row filters see, because a filtered index stream is the
*difference* between neighbouring indices. Discovery order -- raster scan --
optimises neither.

Two rules. Transparent entries first, so the trailing-opaque `tRNS` trim cuts
as much as §11.3.2.1 allows; one late transparent entry used to pin the whole
chunk to full length. Then by Rec. 601 luma, so neighbouring indices are
neighbouring brightnesses and a smoothly shaded image produces small index
deltas rather than the arbitrary jumps discovery order gives.

Measured by disabling the ordering alone, so the figure is not confounded with
the colour key landing in the same branch:

    row                       unordered   ordered
    sprite_rgba8 +clean            2619      2235   -14.7%
    palette64_rgba8                 715       726    +1.5%

A real trade, and worth stating rather than rounding to "it helps". The
sprite's gain is 35x the palette64 loss, and palette64's colours are synthetic
ramps whose discovery order already correlates with index adjacency -- the
case luma sorting is least able to improve and most able to disturb. The full
modified-Zeng ordering oxipng uses remains #482.

The rest of this commit closes the mutation gaps CI found in the previous
commit's colour key. All seven were in the cost estimate -- the guard deciding
whether to look for a key, the match on `all_gray`, and the arithmetic in both
arms -- and they share one cause worth recording, because it will recur:

**`write_reduced_or_native` makes the estimate much less observable.** A
mutated cost still produces a keyed candidate, which still races the unreduced
encoding, and the smaller still wins. So perturbing the estimate usually
changes which candidate is *offered* without changing the bytes that finally
win. That is the race doing its job -- it is exactly why the estimate stopped
being load-bearing -- but it means an estimate can no longer be tested through
the encoder.

So the arithmetic moves into `may_have_colour_key` and `keyed_size`, tested
directly, with the chunk costs as named constants derived from the spec
(2 + 12 for greyscale, 6 + 12 for truecolour) rather than as literals. Same
treatment the inflation budget and the palette tie-break already got.

Refs #224. Closes #482.
The sprite row's cleaned figure moves 2619 -> 2235 and palette64's 715 -> 726,
which is the trade the ordering commit measured. Axis 4 moves to partial:
ordering landed, modified-Zeng and the caller-supplied palette path remain.

Refs #224
Sum-of-absolutes asks "are these bytes small?". DEFLATE asks "are these bytes
repetitive?". Those are different questions, and a row alternating 0 and 200
answers the first badly and the second beautifully -- which is why oxipng
dropped libpng's MinSum from every preset except its cheapest and its most
expensive.

That is a preset table, not published byte counts, so gamut measured it on its
own corpus. IDAT bytes at `Level::Best`, each heuristic alone:

    input             MinSumAbs   Entropy   Bigrams   winner
    gradient_rgb8          2215      2215      1505   Bigrams
    photo_rgb8            25364     22427     19513   Bigrams
    noise_rgb8           196890    196890    196890   tie
    grey_as_rgb8            475       506       506   MinSumAbs
    palette64_rgba8         990       899       770   Bigrams
    sprite_rgba8           3672      3857      4062   MinSumAbs
    flat_rgba8              573       573       605   MinSumAbs
    tiny_rgb8                79        79        62   Bigrams

Bigrams wins four rows by 22-32%; MinSumAbs wins three by 5-6%. Neither
dominates and the margins run the wrong way to drop either, so both are in the
brute-force set -- which is also the shape of oxipng's own presets.

**Entropy is never the unique winner, and that is recorded as a negative
result rather than quietly merged.** It beats MinSumAbs on the photographic
and palette rows but loses to Bigrams on both, and ties MinSumAbs elsewhere.
The brute-force set resolves by taking the smallest, so a candidate dominated
everywhere costs a full filter pass and a full DEFLATE for nothing. It is not
in that set. It stays selectable, because eight images is a corpus and not a
proof, and `docs/benchmarking.md` asks for the negative result to be written
down so nobody re-derives it.

End to end, with Bigrams in the brute-force set:

    row              before    after
    gradient_rgb8      2272     1562   -31.2%   (vs libpng-9: -5.1% -> -34.7%)
    tiny_rgb8           135      119   -11.9%   (vs libpng-9: -2.2% -> -13.8%)
    photo_rgb8        20293    19570    -3.6%   (vs libpng-9: -26.1% -> -28.8%)

The scorers share one `Scratch` allocated per image, not per scanline: the
bigram set is 8 KiB of bitset and rebuilding it per row would dominate the
very measurement it exists to make cheap. A test pins that the scratch does
not leak state between rows, because a stale one would silently score every
row after the first against the previous row's data.

`tests/backends.rs`'s `rgb8_best_bruteforce` golden is re-captured: Bigrams
wins on that fixture and takes its IDAT from 36 bytes to 21. That pin exists
to prove the *codec-abi seam* is inert, not to freeze the encoder, so the
comment there now records the re-capture and why -- an encoder change making
output *larger* would look identical at that assertion and would be a
regression.

Refs #224, #480.
`choose_by` seeded `best_score` with `u64::MAX` and improved on a strict
`<`, so a row whose five candidates all scored `u64::MAX` left `best_bytes`
untouched. `filter_image` hoists that buffer out of the row loop, so such a
row was emitted under a filter byte of 0 carrying the *previous* row's
residuals -- or, on the first row, nothing at all.

`Score::Entropy` reached that sentinel whenever no byte value repeated in
the filtered row, which is ordinary for narrow images. A 2x1 Gray8 `[1, 3]`
encoded to a PNG whose IDAT is shorter than its image; a 2x2 `[0, 0, 0, 1]`
encoded to a structurally valid PNG decoding to `[0, 0, 0, 0]` -- silent
corruption, no error anywhere.

Two independent fixes, because one is a class and the other an instance.
`best_score` becomes `Option<u64>`, so "nothing chosen yet" is
unrepresentable as a score and the first candidate is taken whatever any
scorer returns; a future scorer cannot reintroduce this. And the entropy
score is restated as `sum c*log2(n/c)`, the quantity its doc already
claimed, which is non-negative and bounded by `8n*256` -- so it can no
longer collide with a sentinel at all.

The tie-break is unchanged: the only comparison is still a strict `<` over
candidates 2..5, and candidate 1 is `FilterType::None`, first in the
documented None/Sub/Up/Average/Paeth order. No pinned bytes move, because
`sum_abs` and `Bigrams` are bounded far below `u64::MAX` and so always
wrote on their first candidate already -- the two paths are bit-identical
for every strategy in `BRUTE_FORCE_STRATEGIES`, and `MinEntropy` is not in
that set.

`tests/oracle.rs` gains the end-to-end sweep whose absence hid this:
`MinEntropy` was scored by unit tests but never encoded with.
`(a << 8) | b` over two `u8`s is spelling out `u16::from_be_bytes`, and it
costs two operators that carry no meaning of their own. One of them has no
behavioural variant at all: the low byte of `a << 8` is zero, so `|` and
`^` compute the same index, and no test can ever tell them apart.

`.cargo/mutants.toml` would accept a line-scoped exclusion with that
argument written out. Restructuring is better and the file already prefers
it -- `deconstruct.rs` twice shapes code so an equivalent mutant is never
generated rather than excluding one after the fact. Reading the pair as the
big-endian `u16` it is leaves no operator to mutate.

The bigram vectors gain the case none of them covered: (1,3), (3,2), (2,3)
is three distinct pairs over two distinct second bytes, so an index that
dropped the high byte would report two. Every existing vector happens to
have as many pairs as second bytes.
`analyze8` reached its colour-key branch through `key.expect(...)` -- the
only `expect` outside `#[cfg(test)]` in the crate's `src/`, which the
house rule forbids in library code paths. Fold the option into the guard
with a let-chain, as the palette scan at the top of the function already
does. Behaviour is identical: when no key was found `keyed_size` is
`usize::MAX`, and `best` has already been proven smaller than
`input_size`, so `best == keyed_size` could never hold.

`colour_key` carried the same shape one level down. Its `any_transparent`
flag was assigned in exactly the arm that assigns `candidate`, so
`!any_transparent` was a spelling of `candidate.is_none()` that the
following `candidate?` discharges again -- an unkillable mutant in a file
`.cargo/mutants.toml` does not exclude. Drop the flag and record in the
doc why condition 2 needs no check of its own, including the caller gate
(`may_have_colour_key` requires `!all_opaque`) that makes the `?` itself
unreachable in practice.
`ordered_palette` was untested as a function: every palette fixture in
the crate happens to have discovery order equal to sorted order, so none
of them could tell it from the identity. The three Rec. 601 weights
survived mutation to additions for exactly that reason.

Pin the luma order on a five-entry fixture chosen so collapsing any one
weight to an addition returns a different sequence, and tabulate the four
columns in the doc comment so the choice of entries is auditable.

Pin rule 1 separately, through `build_indexed`, on a palette whose
transparent entry is discovered last -- the case first-appearance order
gets wrong. In discovery order the `tRNS` alphas are `[255, 255, 0]` and
the trailing-opaque trim cannot shorten them at all; sorted
transparent-first they are `[0, 255, 255]` and the trim cuts two of three.
A PNG chunk type is four unvalidated bytes and the deconstruct walk never
drops a chunk, so a hostile file chooses how many *distinct* types it
carries: one per 12-byte chunk. Accumulating the per-type totals with a
linear scan over the types seen so far was therefore quadratic in the
file length, reachable from `gamut inspect` on an untrusted file — 4.8 MB
of empty chunks took 40.9 s.

A private `ChunkTally` keeps a `HashMap<[u8; 4], usize>` beside the stats
vector, so each chunk costs O(1) and the public `Vec<ChunkStats>` keeps
the first-appearance order it documents. The map is dropped at the end of
the walk and never surfaced; `ChunkStats` stays `Copy` and
`#[non_exhaustive]`.

Hashing attacker-chosen keys is safe only because the default hasher is
SipHash-1-3 with a per-process seed, so that is recorded on the type: a
faster unseeded hasher would reopen the blow-up by a different route.

`PngReport::chunk` stays a linear scan — O(distinct types) per call, not
quadratic — and now documents that cost, and that summarising every type
means iterating `chunks` once rather than calling it per type.

The regression test asserts a self-calibrating ratio rather than a
wall-clock ceiling, which would be flaky under `llvm-cov` and parallel
test binaries: two files of equal byte length and equal chunk count, one
distinct type per chunk against one repeated type, deconstructed back to
back in one process. Measured 3–5x with the index and 1488x without it
(18.0 s against 12.1 ms), so the 20x bound has ~4x of headroom above the
fix and ~75x below the defect.
`with_transparent_cleanup` documented "no effect on an image with no fully
transparent pixel, or on a layout with no alpha channel", but `cleaned_samples`
was only reached from `EncodeImage<Rgba8>` and `EncodeImage<GrayAlpha8>`.
`Rgba16` and `GrayAlpha16` carry an alpha channel and can carry fully
transparent pixels, so a caller enabling the knob on a 16-bit sprite got the
documented behaviour's opposite: silently nothing.

`reduce::clean_transparent` cannot serve those layouts — it reads one-byte
samples on a one-byte stride, whereas a 16-bit pixel is invisible only when its
whole alpha sample is zero, and clearing a colour sample must clear all sixteen
bits. Add `clean_transparent16`, its `u16` twin, beside the encoder. Working on
the samples rather than on the big-endian bytes `encode_16bit` serialises keeps
the ordering identical to the 8-bit paths: cleanup runs first, so
`reduce::analyze16` sees the collapsed invisible pixels. `encode_16bit`
therefore takes dimensions plus samples instead of the `ImageRef`, so the alpha
layouts can hand it a cleaned buffer.

The inline tests pin the two things the byte-wise reading would get wrong: an
alpha sample of `0x0001` is visible (its high byte is zero), and every cleared
colour sample is cleared in both bytes. `tests/transparent_cleanup.rs` adds the
end-to-end halves for both layouts against libpng — `decode` rather than
`decode_rgba8`, which would scale 16-bit samples down to 8 and hide exactly that
low byte — plus the size claim and the byte-identical no-op on an opaque image.

Correct the doc to describe what is now true.
Four corrections that this branch's new bench, size contract and golden
re-capture made due.

`benchmarking.md`'s counter table said "per-pixel or per-sample kernel ->
ItemsCount", which reads as a rule `gamut-png`'s stage benches break: they count
`BytesCount` over `crc32`, `pack_scanlines`, `filter_image` and `analyze8/16`.
They do not break it. Those are byte-oriented stages of a codec pipeline whose
natural item *is* a byte, and counting items would put their figures in a
different unit from the crate's own encode benchmark and its size table, which
are the figures a stage row exists to be read against. The workspace's actual
`ItemsCount` users are all kernels whose item is not a byte -- `gamut-dsp`
counts transform coefficients, `gamut-tonemap` `f32` samples, `gamut-color`
`f64` samples and pixels, `gamut-bitstream` coded symbols, `gamut-cmm`
transformed pixels -- and bytes per second would say nothing about any of them.
So amend the rule rather than the bench: add the byte-oriented-stage row and
sharpen the existing one to name the distinction it was always making.

`testing.md`'s per-crate authority row for `gamut-png` named only "differential
+ conformance", omitting the size contract this branch adds, while `gamut-webp`
names its own. Mirror it, and cite `crates/gamut-png/tests/size_contract.rs`
from the technique table beside `gamut-webp/tests/effort.rs`.

`mise.toml`'s `bench-test` comment says why `--benches` is passed and counts the
workspace's benches to make the point; `gamut-png`'s is the sixteenth. (The
"all 15 crates" at the top of the file is about `tooling/` and is a separate
claim.)

`gamut-png/tests/backends.rs`'s header says the goldens were captured before the
seam existed, which the per-row note directly below it already contradicts for
`rgb8_best_bruteforce`. State the exception in the header instead of leaving the
two to disagree; no golden byte moves.
The report walk capped the *filtered* stream at 64 MiB while documenting
that cap as matching the decoder's image budget. The decoder budgets the
*decoded* buffer instead, and the two differ by exactly one filter byte
per scanline: a 4096x4096 RGBA8 image is 67 108 864 native bytes, which
decodes on the default budget, and 67 112 960 filtered, which the walk
declined — so `deconstruct` reported an undamaged file as damaged and
`gamut inspect` exited non-zero on it.

Two constants asserted to agree had drifted, so make the agreement
structural. `ihdr::native_bytes` is now the single definition of the
quantity; `PngDecoder::check_limits` reads it (byte-identical behaviour,
pinned by `byte_budget_is_exact`), and `MAX_FILTERED_BYTES` /
`within_inflation_budget` give way to `fits_decode_budget(header,
max_image_bytes)`. The budget is a parameter, so the inclusive boundary
is reachable from a unit test without a 64 MiB fixture. Inflation stays
bounded: a file that passes inflates to at most the native bytes plus one
per scanline.

Kept, against the plan: `idat_ratio`'s `filtered_len == 0` guard. It was
to be deleted as unreachable, but it is reachable in thirteen header
bytes. §11.2.1 admits 2^31-1 square, which at RGBA16 implies 2^65
filtered bytes; `adam7::expected_stream_len` refuses to wrap and
`deconstruct` reports such a file rather than erroring, leaving
`filtered_len` zero. `gamut inspect` prints the ratio for every file it
reads, so replacing the guard with a `debug_assert!` would have put a
panic on a hostile-input path. The branch is pinned by a new accounting
test instead, which is what makes it killable rather than equivalent.
`Reduced::GrayKeyed` is reachable and correct, but nothing in the suite
produced one, so neither `analyze8`'s `all_gray` split inside the keyed
arm nor the encoder's arm for it had a test that could see them.

Two tests, at the two scopes the placement rule forces. `Reduced` is
private, so the analysis side is pinned inline: grey with binary alpha,
64 opaque levels, and a 65-entry palette that keeps the palette estimate
(540 bytes) out of a race the key wins at 270. The encoder side needs
libpng, and is pinned in `colour_key.rs` as the greyscale twin of the
existing truecolour differential: colour type grey at depth 8, a two-byte
`tRNS`, and an exact round trip.

The key is grey 7 rather than 0 in both, so the `tRNS` sample's byte
order is observable -- written little-endian it would read `[7, 0]`,
which a key of 0 could not distinguish from the correct `[0, 7]`.

The greyscale win is thinner than truecolour's, since dropping the alpha
plane saves one byte per pixel rather than three against the same flat
14-byte chunk. Measured, it wins anyway at every square from 32 to 256:
499 bytes against 626 at 128, about 20%, so the fixture needs no size
threshold.
`write_reduced_or_native` races a chunk-carrying reduction against the
unreduced encoding, and its `carries_chunks` set decides which
reductions enter that race. The palette member had both sides covered;
the keyed members had only the winning one. The three existing negative
tests here all stay RGBA because no key was ever *offered* -- partial
alpha, two invisible colours, a collision with a visible pixel -- not
because a valid key lost on size, so dropping `Rgb8Keyed` from the set
would have gone unnoticed.

Add the losing side at 32x32 on the existing fixture, reconstructing the
candidate that lost: the encoder's `Rgb8Keyed` arm is the RGB stream
through the same configuration plus one 18-byte `tRNS`, so the test can
assert the declined encoding really was the larger one (279 bytes
against RGBA's 274) rather than merely that RGBA survived.

Parameterise the fixture by side to do it, and correct the module doc
while it is in hand: the crossover was measured at 32, not below 128 as
the `SIDE` comment claimed -- at 48 the key already wins, 347 against
353.
Two halves of one gap. The off-grid grey case had been weakened from an
exact colour-type assertion to `COLOR_GRAY || COLOR_PALETTE`; that
fixture produces grey at depth 8, so the palette arm was a branch no
input could take. Assert the colour type exactly again and say in the
comment where the palette case is covered instead.

It is covered here. `a_palette_is_chosen_when_it_actually_wins` needs 64
colours before the race takes the palette at all, and 64 entries is
depth 8, so the encoder's `depth < 8` path into `pack::pack_scanlines`
and `index_bit_depth`'s `3..=4 => 2` arm were only ever reached by
inputs whose palette was then declined.

Four colours at 192x192, arranged by a finalizer-quality hash of the
pixel index rather than in blocks: blocked, the RGBA stream compresses
away and the race keeps it, which is why the 64-colour fixture needed 64
colours. Scattered, both streams sit near their entropy and the 2-bit
packing is the whole difference -- 9500 bytes indexed (9216 of payload)
against 19 135 as RGBA. A cheaper mix was tried first and rejected: one
multiply and a shift is periodic in x, DEFLATE finds the period, and the
same fixture came out at 272 bytes.
`PngReport::filters` was `Option<FilterHistogram>`, so "no histogram"
conflated a file this reader declined to inflate with one whose
compressed data is broken — and `is_intact` treated both as damage.
Now that the walk budgets what the decoder budgets, that conflation is
the last thing standing between a large sound PNG and an intact verdict.

`FilterScan` is `Counted(FilterHistogram)` or `Skipped(SkippedFilterScan)`,
the reason being `#[repr(u8)]` plain data with explicit, permanent,
append-only discriminants: `OverBudget`, `CorruptStream`,
`LengthMismatch`, `UndefinedFilterCode`. `SkippedFilterScan::is_damage`
is the single source of truth for the grading question — only
`OverBudget` is not damage, since it describes the reader's budget rather
than the file — and `is_intact` narrows its conjunct to
`!filters.is_damage()` rather than dropping it, because a corrupt zlib
payload under a valid CRC is damage nothing else in the report can see.
`PngReport::native_bytes` exposes the budgeted quantity, so a caller can
tell what an `OverBudget` verdict was measured against.

`gamut inspect` prints the reason through a `filter_skip_label` with a
wildcard arm, and pushes a damage-bearing skip into the findings list
before printing it — the exit message used to read "0 finding(s)" while
exiting non-zero on a file whose only defect was its IDAT stream.
The module doc said the command exits non-zero when the file "is not
fully accounted for" without saying what that is, and the three formats
name it differently: TIFF and DNG gate on `is_fully_accounted()`, PNG on
`is_intact()`. They are the same strength, which is worth writing down —
PNG's `is_fully_classified()` is printed but is not the gate, being true
by construction for every file `deconstruct` accepts, so gating on it
would exit 0 on a truncated PNG.

Also records that an over-budget filter scan is not a finding, and moves
the stray `/// The display name of a format.` off `inspect_png` and back
onto `format_name`.
It is dead in the shipped crate — the encoder calls `choose_by`
directly, and the wrapper carried `allow(dead_code)` off the
`test-support` feature to say so. What it added on top of `choose_by` was
a fresh 9 KiB `Scratch` per call, which `Score::SumAbs` never reads: the
bench row it existed to serve was therefore measuring a per-scanline
allocation the encoder never performs, and its question — what the
sum-of-absolute-residuals heuristic costs per row — is already answered
by the `filter_image / MinSumAbs` row.

It was also a wrapper body in a seam whose own module doc forbids them:
`stages` is "re-exports and nothing else", because bench targets are
reached by no gate, so a body there drags the coverage floor and
generates mutants nothing can kill.

Its one test moves to `choose_by(Score::SumAbs, ...)`, the call the
encoder actually makes, and keeps its teeth: inverting `choose_by`'s
comparison still fails it.
The table's ratios were chosen by hand, so nothing said what a budget meant or
when it should move. Each `max_ratio` is now `measured` times a stated headroom,
rounded up to two decimals, and `Budget::max_ratio` carries the procedure for
refreshing the whole table after an encoder change.

The refresh also adds the three rows the bench reported and nothing gated: both
`+clean` columns and `tiny_rgb8`. `Budget` grows `fixture`, `side` and `cleanup`
so a cleaned row shares its twin's pixels instead of duplicating them.

Two rows take less than the default 5%. `sprite_rgba8` measures 0.963, where 5%
rounds past 1.00 and would surrender the claim the row exists to make, so it
takes 2%. `palette64_rgba8 +clean` takes 2% because there is nothing to protect:
cleaning *costs* bytes there, 403 against the uncleaned 364.

That last row's justification had it backwards -- it predicted shorter PLTE and
tRNS and therefore a smaller file. Both halves of that are true and the file
still grows, because collapsing the transparent entries rewrites pixels that
were compressing well and at 128x128 the second effect wins.
`with_transparent_cleanup` is a canonicalisation, not an optimisation. The row
now says so, which is the drift this refresh exists to catch.

The gradient and photo rows move on their own: 0.939 to 0.772 and 0.752 to
0.731, from this branch's encoder work.

Refs #224
`with_transparent_cleanup` committed to the transform on the assumption
that collapsing invisible pixels to one colour can only help. Measured on
`palette64_rgba8`, it does not: cleaning is worth -2.3% at 32x32, **+10.7%
at 128x128** and -5.2% at 256x256, with both candidates landing on the same
colour type throughout. The sign is a property of the image, not of any
reduction.

The mechanism is that cleaning is a *transform*, not a reduction. It
rewrites bytes DEFLATE was already compressing. Where the invisible pixels
carry noise -- a sprite -- zeroing them is worth ~31%. Where they carry
structure that continues under the transparent region, zeroing inserts a
discontinuity that costs more than the collapsed palette saves.

This is the same failure `6b31ab9` fixed one axis over for palettes, and it
takes the same fix: encode both candidates and keep the smaller, with no
tuned constant. `cleaned_or_plain` mirrors `write_reduced_or_native`, and
the two per-buffer encodes are factored into `encode_alpha8`/`encode_alpha16`
so all four alpha-carrying layouts race identically at both bit depths.
A tie keeps the cleaned encoding, which carries less unseen data.

`with_transparent_cleanup` now means "clean where it pays" and can never
cost bytes. `cleanup_never_costs_bytes_on_any_corpus_row` pins that as a
law over every corpus row -- it needs no constant and would have failed
before this change -- and `palette64_rgba8 +clean` is the row that
exercises the declining side, now measuring exactly what its uncleaned twin
does.
"Everything here is produced by `cargo bench` and gated by
`tests/size_contract.rs`" was true of neither half. The size table is now
gated in full -- every row including `tiny_rgb8` and both `+clean` columns
-- while the throughput and per-heuristic tables are reported only, because
a timing assertion cannot fail a build without making it flaky, which is
why CI runs the benches for compile rot alone (#437). Saying so is the
point: a reader deciding whether a number is load-bearing should not have
to open the test.

Axis 5 was stale in both directions. Cleanup is worth 40.1% on the sprite
row, not the 30% recorded before palette ordering landed, and it now
applies to every alpha-carrying layout at 8 and 16 bits. It is also raced
rather than assumed: on `palette64_rgba8` cleaning measures -2.3% at 32x32,
+10.7% at 128x128 and -5.2% at 256x256, so the axis is only "done" because
`cleaned_or_plain` keeps whichever encoding is smaller.

The `choose_min_sum_abs` throughput row is dropped with the function. Its
4.5x measured a per-scanline 9 KiB `Scratch` allocation the encoder never
performs, so the figure described the benchmark rather than the codec.

The size and per-heuristic tables are re-measured at this revision and
unchanged, which is the result worth recording for the entropy score's
restatement: it is ranking-equivalent on every corpus row.

The bench gains `docs/benchmarking.md`'s house phrase, naming the axes it
deliberately does not measure.
real conflict and one behavioural collision, both in the palette path.

**The `tRNS` trim.** master removed the `alphas.len() > 1` guard, arguing
the loop cannot empty the vector because the arm only runs when some
entry's alpha is not 255. This branch had rewritten the same lines to
iterate the *ordered* palette. Both are kept: ordering makes master's
argument stronger rather than weaker, since the entry that halts the loop
is now at index 0, so it stops with at least one element left.

**`indexed_at_depth_eight_is_not_bit_packed`.** master added it pinning
`ColorType::Indexed` on 32 colours over 200 pixels, which this branch's
`write_reduced_or_native` race declines -- correctly. That fixture's RGB
stream compresses to an 82-byte file and its `PLTE` alone is 96 bytes, so
the palette cannot win before a single index is written; pinning `Indexed`
there asserts the defect the race exists to fix. The fixture moves to 1024
pseudo-random pixels, where the palette wins on measurement (479 against
525) and the test's actual claim -- depth 8, unpacked, 32 entries -- is
preserved. This is the third test in this series to pin a colour type as a
proxy for "a reduction happened".

master's `PngPalette::is_empty` mutants exclusion is unrelated to the
survivors closed here and carries over untouched.
The two survivors CI reported against the last push, both in code this
series added.

`cleaned_or_plain` inlined its comparison, so nothing pinned the tie its
doc promises. `write_reduced_or_native` already had this problem and
already solved it: `prefers_native` exists because two encodings of the
same image cannot be made to land on exactly equal lengths by any fixture,
so the tie is only assertable at the boundary. `prefers_plain` is its twin,
and it keeps the cleaned encoding on a tie -- less unseen data for the same
bytes.

The entropy weighting needed a fixture no existing row provided. Replacing
`c * log2(n/c)` with `c + log2(n/c)` leaves a score that mostly counts
distinct symbols, and every vector in the suite happens to rank the same
way under both. The new pair inverts: sixteen bytes split evenly between
two symbols carry a full bit each, while fourteen of one symbol plus two
singletons carry less information despite having *more* distinct symbols.
Weighted, the concentrated row scores lower; unweighted it scores higher,
because it has three log terms against two.

Both verified by hand-applying the exact mutation and running the package
suite. No `.cargo/mutants.toml` exclusions.
The walk took two attacker-chosen quantities on trust and conflated two
different verdicts.

`DeconstructLimits` makes both ceilings the caller's. `max_image_bytes` was
hard-coded to the decoder's default, so "a report never allocates more than a
decode would" held only against a default-configured decoder; it is now a
parameter, with `deconstruct_with_limits` beside `deconstruct` and builder
methods matching `PngDecoder::with_max_image_bytes`. `max_chunks` is new: a
chunk costs 12 bytes of input and buys a `Segment`, plus a `ChunkStats` and an
index entry for a type not seen before, so an unbounded chunk count is
unbounded heap at roughly an order of magnitude over the file size -- and the
chunk type is four unvalidated bytes, so the distinct-type count is chosen by
the input too. Every other attacker-driven quantity in this crate already has a
documented cap; this one had none.

`is_verified` separates "this file was read" from `is_intact`'s "nothing is
known against this file". They are not the same claim: a file whose IDAT was
never inflated satisfies `is_intact` vacuously, and a corrupt zlib payload
under a valid CRC is damage only the scan can see. `FilterScan::is_counted`
answers the narrow question both rest on. `is_intact` keeps its meaning, which
is the one a report wants; a gate wants the other.

`pass_stats` now checks its running total the way `adam7::expected_stream_len`
does. Bailing out only per pass let an interlaced header whose seven passes
each fit `usize` but whose sum does not report all seven passes against a
`filtered_len` saturated to 0 -- and `idat_ratio` then printed `0.0%` as though
it were a measurement.
…dict

Four cases the suite could not see.

`UndefinedFilterCode` was the only skip reason with no fixture: the variant
appeared in an `is_damage` assertion and a discriminant pin, but nothing drove
`scan_filters` into it. Delete the `FilterType::from_code` guard and a hostile
file's undefined code is counted as `None` under a bogus histogram, with every
other assertion still passing.

`is_verified` needs the case that separates it from `is_intact` -- an
over-budget file, where nothing is known to be wrong and nothing was read.

The chunk ceiling is asserted from both sides, so the cap cannot degenerate
into a refusal to measure.

The interlaced overflow twin covers where the two checks disagree: seven passes
that each fit `usize` while their sum does not.
`gamut inspect` sells itself as an archival CI gate and exited 0 on any file
whose IDAT it never inflated. At the decoder's 64 MiB budget that was every PNG
past 4096x4096 RGBA8 -- an ordinary photograph -- reported `intact: yes`
whatever the compressed stream contained. Chunk CRCs do not cover it: a
corrupt-but-CRC-valid IDAT is exactly the damage only the scan can see.

Two changes, because there were two faults. The walk's budget here is now a
gigabyte rather than the decoder's default: a decoder's budget guards a decode
against hostile input, while reading the file is this command's whole job, and
past any real image is the right place for that line. And the gate is
`is_verified`, so a file that still could not be read exits non-zero saying it
was not verified, distinctly from a damaged one. `intact:` is still printed and
still true -- nothing is held against such a file -- but it is no longer
mistaken for a verification.

Measured on a 4100x4100 RGBA8 image, past the old budget: sound, it now counts
all 4100 scanlines and exits 0; with its IDAT corrupted under a valid chunk
CRC, it now exits 1. Both exited 0 before.

The per-chunk-type table also bypassed `MAX_LIST`, so 400k distinct types in a
4.8 MB file printed 23.6 MB of stdout, and the findings list materialized one
`String` per damaged chunk before truncating at print. Both are now built under
the bound they are printed under, with the true total still reported.
… dirtied

`FilterStrategy` is public, re-exported through the umbrella, and gained two
variants this branch -- which breaks any downstream exhaustive `match`. At
0.1.0 a minor bump is Cargo's breaking slot so nothing breaks today, and
`#[non_exhaustive]` is free now and not later. It is also already the house
style: the workspace uses it in 212 places, `SkippedFilterScan` and `PngReport`
included.

The bigram scorer wiped its whole 8 KiB bitset per candidate -- 40 KiB of
memset per scanline at five candidates, independent of row length, which for an
ordinary row is more work than the scoring it makes possible. `MinBigrams` is
in `BRUTE_FORCE_STRATEGIES`, so `BruteForce` paid it too. The set now records
the words it dirtied and clears only those: a row of n bytes touches at most
n-1 of them. Byte-identical output; the `Scratch` doc no longer claims hoisting
saves a cost that hoisting does not touch.
`ordered_palette` sorted by `(c[3] == 255, c[3], luma)`. The first component is
monotone non-decreasing in the second over 0..=255, so it orders every pair the
way `c[3]` alone already does and can never change the result -- 255 being the
maximum is exactly why ordering by alpha *is* "opaque last". A tuple component
no input can make load-bearing is the kind of branch this repository's mutation
policy exists to keep out.
`a_greyscale_colour_key_drops_the_alpha_channel_losslessly` proves `GrayKeyed`
is reachable, but its fixture wins at every size, so dropping `GrayKeyed` from
`write_reduced_or_native`'s `carries_chunks` set -- emitting the keyed file
without racing it -- would not change its result. Nothing else in the suite
could see that member.

Losing needs a thinner saving than truecolour's: the `tRNS` costs a flat 14
bytes while dropping the alpha plane saves one byte per pixel, so a
mostly-opaque image is where the fixed cost wins. A quarter-width transparent
border at 16x16 measures 88 bytes as `GrayAlpha8` against 97 for the key, and
the encoder must emit the 88.
The cost-model table was a pre-race snapshot presented as current. Its `gamut`
column (451/511/564/715) matches the shipped encoder at no size -- measured
totals are 364/465/563/726 -- and it reported a flat 273-byte `PLTE`+`tRNS` at
every row when a palette is emitted at only one of them. 273 is itself
pre-ordering: this branch's own transparent-first ordering took the `tRNS` from
57 alphas to 8, so the palette candidate's fixed cost is 224. Worse, the 273
was repeated as the written justification for the `palette64_rgba8` budget, in
the file the branch presents as carrying a measured reason per case.

Retabulated from measurement, and restated to say what the three palette-less
rows actually show: the raw estimate picks the palette at every one of these
sizes, and the finished files disagree until 256, which is the argument for
racing rather than estimating.

`the_deflate_stage_accounts_for_the_residual_gap` is renamed to what it
asserts. Landing on the same colour type makes `filtered_len` identical -- it
is a function of IHDR alone -- but not the filtered bytes: gamut runs
BruteForce while libpng runs its own heuristic, so the two compress different
inputs and the ratio never isolated DEFLATE.

The "smaller on every row" claim is qualified where it is a 0.2% near-tie on
incompressible input, which is also the one row whose budget sits above parity
and is excluded from the win assertion. The bench can now print `tie`, which
`STATUS.md` recorded and the winner chain could not produce; and the module doc
no longer tells the reader to pass a `--features test-support` flag that the
crate's dev-dependency on itself already enables.
The rule is "maintainer-approved external crates", and the approval for this
one lived nowhere outside the diff that added it. Recorded where the rule is,
with what it buys and why it does not cost the crate its safety posture.
The incremental mutation gate found five survivors in the previous commits, all
of them gaps in the tests rather than in the code.

`is_counted` and `is_verified` were pinned only by their negative cases -- an
over-budget file, which satisfies every assertion those made even when both
predicates are hardcoded `false`. A verdict a gate depends on was one that
could always have said no. Both now have the positive case as well.

`with_max_image_bytes` was never exercised: the ceiling test only ever set
`max_chunks`, so replacing the setter with `Default::default()` changed
nothing, and `deconstruct_with_limits` was `deconstruct` with extra steps. A
one-byte budget over an ordinary file now makes the caller's choice observable.

The chunk ceiling was asserted far past the boundary, where `>`, `>=` and `==`
are indistinguishable -- any file well over the limit is refused by all three.
It now asserts the exact count: a file of precisely the ceiling's size is
admitted, and one more is refused.

Each of the five was re-applied by hand against this suite to confirm it now
fails.
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

gamut-png: reduce binary alpha to a tRNS colour key for grey and truecolour Measure gamut-png encoder efficiency

1 participant