The byte-path close-quote consume candidate measured NEUTRAL in an
interleaved A/B despite the sampler attributing ~4% of parse to the
advance() chain it replaced: decoding one ASCII scalar into a
small-string-backed Character costs about the same as consume's
literal-matching path. Recorded under Known structure of the gap so no
future round redoes it, with the meta-lesson that sample attribution
overstates single-character round trips and only the interleaved A/B
verdict counts.
Also records the #8 decision: the TreeNode weak-parent side-table cost
(~9% of parse) is accepted for now. unowned is rejected outright since a
trap after release contradicts the never-crash posture and the documented
nil-after-release behavior; the arena/index-based tree remains the
designed future path, sequenced after the scanning-architecture work,
which carries ~47% of parse to this finding's ~9%.
Mihaela Mihaljevic
36f1485f2e