The Wolf Book

The official wolf language text. The web edition is canonical and is set to look like a printed page. The single-file markdown and the PDF come from the same source and inherit the same decisions. principles/DESIGN.md is the binding contract.

27 of the 32 chapters are written. Five are reserved: chapters 19, 20 and 21 need a benchmark instrument the toolchain does not ship, chapter 25 needs an edition mechanism and a publish client, and chapter 29 needs Pool and handle to execute on one lane. Each of the five says so on its own page. Chapter 13 and chapter 23 each reserve sections for the same kind of reason.

Code samples are GPL-3.0-or-later with the wolf Runtime Library Exception, matching the runtime, so code you take from this book into your programs is yours. The prose license is proposed as CC BY 4.0 and is not settled.

The toolchain

Everything is cargo (D34's spirit: one tool).

• cargo xtask samples extracts and executes every code sample: the directive-headed exercise programs under principles/exercises/ and every fenced wolf block in book/, run against the pinned tools (wolf-toolchain.toml). Every ```console block whose commands are all pinned tools is replayed too, against the program printed above it, and the pasted output is byte-compared. A block that needs a shell is reported as skipped by name and never silently trusted. Diagnostics from fail(…) samples are snapshot-checked under snapshots/. samples-pending.toml lists the samples whose directives await a named feature. That list is report-only, and a pass there is a FLIP error, so a feature that lands gets noticed. --self-test proves the rig catches deliberately broken samples. --bless updates snapshots for review.
• cargo xtask contrast compiles and runs the vendored other-language code the book quotes (samples/contrast/), with warnings denied, and checks that every ```rust block in book/ appears there verbatim. Contrast code rots too.
• cargo xtask backmatter [--check] regenerates the two generated pages: Appendix A from the pinned spec's grammar.ebnf, and the Solutions page from the exercise corpus. --check fails on drift and also compares vendor/spec/ against a sibling wolf-lang checkout.
• cargo xtask grammar-sync re-vendors the wolf tmLanguage grammars from wolf-lsp at the pin into highlight/ and regenerates the one highlight stylesheet (theme/highlight.css). --check fails on any drift. Highlighting happens at build time in the preprocessor, and highlight.js ships as an empty file on purpose.
• cargo xtask render [web|md|pdf|all] produces the three artifacts: the mdBook web edition (target/render/web/, custom full theme, section-number anchors #8.4), target/render/wolf-book.md, and target/render/wolf-book.pdf via typst (XCharter and Source Code Pro, same palette as the web). A missing typst is a loud SKIP, and --require-pdf makes it fatal as CI does.
• cargo xtask verify-docs checks doc truth: corpus counts, pin well-formedness, TOC to chapter-stub numbering, the line-count claims, clause tags and diagnostic codes against vendor/spec/, a published solution for every printed exercise, and the tense-discipline greps principles/TONE.md mandates.

No code appears in the book that CI did not execute.

Layout

book/ (SUMMARY, front matter, the 32 chapters, back matter) · theme/ (the full mdBook theme replacement) · highlight/ (vendored grammars, never edited here) · vendor/spec/ (the pinned spec's grammar, clause anchors, and diagnostic-code list) · print/ (PDF fonts) · xtask/ (the pipeline) · principles/ (the book's constitution: TONE.md, TOC.md, EXERCISES.md and the exercise corpus, DESIGN.md, INTERACTIVITY.md) · docs/ (the reviewer checklist, the errata policy, the standing prose audit) · STYLE.md (mechanics) · PRINT.md (the typst decision) · PERMISSIONS.md (the lyric-quotation ledger).