Bake-off · under evaluation
Flagship Bake-Off: FreeMODBUS vs. libharu
Once the freediag warm-up run has proven out the pipeline, the next resurrection project is a bigger commitment: months of agent-squad time on a codebase intended to stand as flagship proof of the modernization method. That's not a project we're picking on a hunch, so two candidates are currently under evaluation side by side.
FreeMODBUS is a widely embedded, bare-metal implementation of the Modbus
protocol; the candidate work there is a straightforward revival of
documentation, tests, and build tooling. libharu is a widely embedded PDF
library; the candidate work there is more ambitious: an agentic port of the
existing C codebase to safe, no_std Rust.
The full story of how we choose between them (what we look at, what rules candidates out, what the comparison teaches us) is a future blog post. For now, this page states only where things stand: both are candidates, neither has been selected, and no work has started on either beyond the evaluation itself.