Inside Palamedes
The useful question is where the model lives, how it crosses the host boundary, and what prevents a framework integration from becoming a second i18n system. Palamedes keeps the answer inspectable in source and decision records.
00 — The wrapper question
One model, several hosts
An application owns its routing, locale policy, rendering, and hosting. Palamedes owns the work that must stay consistent when any of those choices changes: authoring, transforms, catalogs, validation, compilation, and the runtime contract.
Routes, documents, locale policy, rendering
Author, transform, extract, validate
Catalog semantics, audit, merge, compile
Generated modules, types, locale catalogs
Request-scoped lookup and formatting
Typed N-API boundary · between orchestration and native semantics
01 — Compiled output
A real production artifact
The native compiler renders executable catalog modules. This is exact output from the renderer—not a hand-written approximation. Production hosts load that checked artifact through the parser-free entrypoint.
Generated catalog module
Inspect native renderer →
import{defineCompiledCatalog as __palamedesDefineCompiledCatalog}from"@palamedes/core/compiled";const __pm0=(v,r)=>r.join("Hallo ",r.value(v,"name"));const __pb0=(v,r,p)=>r.join(r.pound(p)," Nachricht");const __pb1=(v,r,p)=>r.join(r.pound(p)," Nachrichten");const __pc0={["one"]:__pb0,["other"]:__pb1};const __pm1=(v,r)=>r.plural(v,"count",0,"plural",__pc0);export const messages=__palamedesDefineCompiledCatalog({["greeting"]:__pm0,["inbox"]:__pm1});export default { messages };02 — The machine
Mechanisms, not adjectives
Every claim below points to an artifact or an accepted decision. The list is intentionally implementation-facing: it is more useful than a generic language or performance badge.
Generated catalogs compile into message functions. The production entrypoints keep the ICU parser out of that module graph while compatibility entrypoints retain deliberate support for authored string catalogs.
Extraction caches source analysis behind conservative file stamps. A cache miss is normal; a result that cannot be trusted is discarded instead of being treated as an optimization win.
Each extraction worker owns a thread-local Oxc arena and resets it between files. On the 1,500-file corpus, replacing per-file allocation removed the allocator pressure that had obscured useful parallel work.
Ferrocat's PO scanner uses vectorized byte search—including a NEON path—then falls back to portable search. The optimization lives below the catalog contract, so host adapters do not need to know it exists.
The 1,500-file fixture measured 119 ms serial, reached 45 ms at four workers, then regressed to 197 ms at twenty. Profiling attributed 92.8% of twenty-worker samples to mach_vm_protect, so the default is bounded rather than maximal.
Ferrocat performs catalog parsing, merging, auditing, and compilation as one semantic surface. It exists so catalog correctness does not depend on a set of loosely coordinated scripts.
The Node binding passes typed values across N-API and exposes meaningful workflow operations. It avoids JSON transport and avoids pushing catalog semantics back into TypeScript orchestration.
Framework integrations own host concerns such as module hooks, routing conventions, and rendering. They do not become alternate implementations of extraction, catalog behavior, or runtime meaning.
Each request receives one getI18n-shaped runtime and one document locale. Server rendering, hydration, formatters, and React Router RSC stay inside that request scope instead of accumulating framework-specific semantics.
The site derives benchmark display, corpus scope, matrix axes, and decision indexes from checked repository data. A changed fixture or missing decision cannot silently become a stronger public claim.