schemacompiler

Compiles JSON Schema Draft 2020-12 into an analyzed plan that a code generator (such as ogen) lowers into Go types, decoders, and validators.

Status: alpha. The API is unstable and the compiler targets a well-defined subset; unsupported constructs are reported as diagnostics rather than mis-compiled.

What it does

JSON Schema is a predicate language, not a type language: many schemas describe constraints an ordinary Go type cannot express, while others collapse into a direct type or a finite static dispatch. schemacompiler separates the four concerns and produces an analyzed plan.CompilationPlan rather than emitting Go directly:

• Representation — the Go data shape (string, struct, union, …).
• Validation — residual, kind-guarded predicates the type cannot enforce.
• Dispatch — how a value selects among known alternatives (kind / literal / tagged property / match-count).
• Resolution — how $ref / $dynamicRef targets are resolved.

Each plan is classified on a capability ladder, so a backend knows exactly how far a schema can be lowered soundly.

Capability	Meaning
DirectGoType	a plain Go type captures the value; no validator needed
GoTypeWithValidation	known type plus residual predicates
StaticDispatch	finite alternatives, discriminated at compile time
PredicateDispatch	alternatives need predicate / match-count evaluation
EvaluationStateValidation	needs unevaluatedProperties / unevaluatedItems tracking
DynamicSchemaResolution	target depends on runtime $dynamicRef scope
Unsupported	no sound conversion

The compiler never generates an under-approximate type: when an exact representation is impossible it widens to a broad type plus an exact residual validator, and records a diagnostic explaining why.

Usage

res, err := schemacompiler.Compile(ctx, schemaBytes, schemacompiler.Options{})
if err != nil {
    // only malformed input fails; a dangling $ref is a diagnostic, not an error
}
fmt.Println(res.Capability, res.Exactness)
for _, d := range res.Diagnostics {
    fmt.Println(d.Severity, d.Pointer, d.Message)
}

The parser is libopenapi, isolated behind an internal frontend adapter, so an OpenAPI 3.1 schema already parsed by ogen can be fed in directly without re-parsing.

Debugging: cmd/schemac

Inspect each stage of the pipeline for a schema:

go run ./cmd/schemac -all schema.json                     # IR, normalized IR, plan, graphs
go run ./cmd/schemac -graph schema.json | dot -Tsvg > refs.svg    # reference graph
go run ./cmd/schemac -plangraph schema.json | dot -Tsvg > plan.svg # dispatch tree

• -graph renders the reference graph (solid = instance descent, dashed = logical edge; recursive components colored green = guarded, red = unguarded).
• -plangraph renders the dispatch tree (how a value routes through kind/literal/ property dispatch to representations).

Architecture

load + resolve ──► semantic IR ──► normalize ──► plans + classify ──► Result
   (frontend)        (ir)           (norm)          (planner)

See docs/implementation.md for the design and invariants, docs/integration.md for how a generator consumes the plan, and the reference design in _ref/.

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.