Both exhausted branches write a third symbol in the same pass that the
guard admitted for two. The Huffman weight decoder calls this with a
256-byte buffer and a limit of 256, so `at` reached 256 exactly, which
is one past the end, and a crafted weight stream turned that into an
IndexError rather than a refusal. A 53-byte input reproduces it, and
random mutation of a real tile found it independently.
A feasibility spike, standalone so it can move to its own repository. Not
wired into the app and not a dependency of it.
Decompression only, and only what our containers need: no dictionaries, no
multi-frame, no streaming, and the content checksum is parsed but never
verified. Native only, since the bit reader carries 56 bits in an int.
It is correct on real data. The committed fixture decodes to the samples
the generator wrote, and tool/oracle.py drives a byte-for-byte comparison
against pyzstd over 32 containers and 2,615 blocks from both tiers, every
thinned column count from 3601 to 361, and 88 S to 80 N. All identical.
The numbers, AOT on this box, 131,072 bytes a block: 0.66 ms median
against pyzstd's 0.175, so about 200 MB/s against 750. Across three tiles
the range is 0.66 to 0.94 ms, and a 113 block sweep is 67 to 105 ms. The
cost is the sequence loop and nothing else: a terrain block at level 19
carries around 1,700 literals and 14,400 sequences, so optimising the
literal path bought nothing.
