Roadmap & Evidence Gaps

This page records evidence and stabilization work, not promised delivery dates. Program tracking: stacksjs/stacks#2060.

Current status

The white paper is a governed Protocol 1.0 working draft. RFC 0001 is accepted; RFCs 0002–0005 remain proposed. Their review window was scheduled to end 20 August 2026, and as of 4 October 2026 the RFC repository publishes no decision records for them, so none is ratified. Reference implementation code does not bypass that review process.

Stacks.js is a pre-1.0 reference implementation with no profile claim. The generated evidence page pins source bf1245e336ab14551e22cb7d88284f93e649a1a2, evidence commit 6008859d6e3d75e115261d6b7de76826324788da, and RFC commit cda56fb8f967ca9f7522b119425a3f438f7f2fe9.

Completed foundations

RFC 0001 publishes maintainers, sponsorship, quorum, voting, conflicts, appeals, security handling, compatibility classes, and review windows.
Specification text is CC BY 4.0; fixtures/runner material is MIT-licensed.
RFC 0002 proposes 47 stable requirement IDs and Core ← Standard ← Complete inheritance with pass-only claim semantics.
RFC 0003 proposes 16 deterministic runner-neutral fixtures and database, queue, cache, storage, mail, realtime, and deployment contracts.
RFC 0004 proposes a JSON Schema plus semantic checks for attributable reports.
An independent standard-library Python runner consumes the shared suite and reports 15 passes without claiming a profile.
Stacks CI pins the RFC revision, rejects suite drift, runs its adapter, validates the report, and retains JSON/Markdown artifacts. Its claim remains null.
A deterministic source manifest, runtime driver registry, and Craft support matrix now feed this paper through a checksummed evidence lock.
Deterministic, budgeted buddy ai:context output now excludes dependency trees, locks, build state, environment files, credentials, and private keys; its source contract is retained in the evidence lock.

Governance gates

#2050 and #2051 stay open until their RFC review/vote records are complete. The report schema and generated Stacks.js report tracked by #2052 are complete, but do not constitute ratification or a profile claim.
RFC 0005 and #2061 block broad production claims for environment encryption.
A profile claim requires every inherited requirement to pass; skipped, unsupported, exception, and experimental results never satisfy it.

Reference implementation evidence still needed

After ratification, freeze the implemented fixture corpus against the accepted requirement catalog and update retained per-driver service versions or topologies for any fixtures added during review.
Finish capability metadata coverage plus broader internal-link and executable snippet verification. OpenAPI/declaration freshness, the Buddy command reference, and the compact AI context path are already covered (#2056, #2032).
Complete independent review and disposition for environment envelope v2 (#2058, #2061).
Provision platform signing/notarization and retain signed launch, update, and uninstall evidence before any Craft row becomes stable. Native packaging, install, and rollback CI tracked by #2063 is complete (#2059, #2062, #2063).
Publish a reproducible efficiency harness for a fixed reference application, covering authoring tokens and files per feature, runtime latency and resource use, and energy per request, build, and test run, then track regressions in CI.

Documentation quality still needed

Tag remaining capability pages with maturity and last-verified evidence.
Test selected commands/snippets and internal links in CI.
Keep provider-specific claims tied to exact provider revisions.
Keep protocol requirements in the RFC repository and Stacks.js syntax in implementation guides.
Continue removing unsupported benchmark and legal-compliance conclusions.

Extension work

AI, analytics, desktop, CMS, commerce, search, and internationalization are independent extension badges. Craft is currently reported as experimental; the other extensions remain unsupported by the Stacks protocol adapter until their specific evidence is executed.

Licenses and community

Specification: CC BY 4.0
Fixtures and runner: MIT
Stacks.js implementation: MIT
Governance: RFC 0001
Discussions: github.com/stacksjs/stacks/discussions