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10. Byte-stable serialisation

The IR file is the IR value serialised as:

  • UTF-8, no byte order mark, LF line endings, a final newline;
  • object members sorted by the UTF-16 code units of their names (the order of RFC 8785), two-space indentation;
  • strings escaped as RFC 8785 does; numbers as RFC 8785 does (every IR integer member is from -(2^53 - 1) to 2^53 - 1, the safe range of I-JSON, RFC 7493; numeric refinements are decimal literal strings, section 13; values held as opaque JSON, such as examples, default and extension values, are not IR integer members and are not bounded);
  • durations as integer milliseconds, sizes as integer bytes, dates as YYYY-MM-DD strings, instants never generated;
  • text read through $file with line endings normalised to LF and a byte order mark removed; no other Unicode normalisation;
  • no absolute path, file name, time, host, user, locale-dependent value or source position.

The same contract gives the same bytes on linux, macOS and Windows, under any TZ, LANG and checkout line ending (FR-9, SCN-015, SM-3). A bundle’s integrity hash is computed over these bytes (ADR 0011).