Contex 0.9 — first year in production
What broke, what held, and the two design decisions we would reverse if the format were not already in other people's hands.
The format held. The tooling did not. Across the first year the compiler was correct in every reported case; the ergonomics around it produced eleven of the fourteen filed issues. That ratio is a finding, not an accident: we spent our review attention on the part we thought was risky.
The decision we would reverse: allowing an implicit epoch. A file without a declared epoch resolves against the compiler's own version, which means the same file compiled in 2024 and 2026 can differ. It is documented. It is still wrong. Epoch will be mandatory in 1.0 and the migration is a one-line prepend.
The decision we would keep, against early advice: no plugins. Every extension request in the first year could be served by a preprocessing step outside the format. A plugin API would have made the deterministic guarantee unenforceable on the first day it was used.
[1]Issue counts from the public tracker, 2024-11-01 to 2025-11-01.
[2]Epoch migration note published alongside the 1.0 release candidate.