Documentation Guide

Canonical documentation lives in this repo root.

Root Docs (Active)

File	Purpose
`README.md`	User-facing introduction, build/test instructions
`PLAN.md`	Checkbox-only work list (keep recent completions with EST timestamps)
`PROJECT_OVERVIEW.md`	Project goals + terminology definitions
`RULES.md`	Non-negotiable project rules
`ROADMAP.md`	Fairly certain future goals
`ARCHITECTURE.md`	Hexagonal architecture design, FFI boundary
`CODE_MINIMAP.md`	Project structure and file purposes (no issues/TODOs)
`FORMAT_VERIFICATIONS.md`	Validation coverage by format
`VALIDATE_VERIFICATION.md`	Per-format corruption test checklist
`PERF_EXPERIMENTS.md`	Performance optimization results

File	Purpose
`docs/H264_SPECIFICATION.md`	H.264 decoder spec (deferred work)
`docs/JPEGXL_ANALYSIS.md`	JPEG-XL performance analysis
`docs/Silent_Data_Corruption_at_Scale.md`	Facebook SDC research (project motivation)
`docs/HEIF_CRASH_INVESTIGATION.md`	HEIF stack overflow investigation
`docs/thread_safety/*.md`	Thread safety analysis per library