CodecCat v0.1.0a5 — Native Alpha

Native Alpha: more reliable UTF-8 decoding of text containing only a few non-ASCII characters.

• Conservative evidence threshold reduced from 16 to 3 non-ASCII Unicode characters, while retaining strict UTF-8 validation, BOM handling, 64-byte minimum, control-character guard and L3 opt-in behavior.
• Exact frozen model bytes unchanged from v0.1.0a4. No new runtime dependencies or public API changes.
• Six platform Wheels (Linux/macOS/Windows, x86-64/ARM64) passed built-and-installed CI: https://github.com/Johnny-Kao/CodecCat/actions/runs/42157726285
• Python 3.10-3.14, Root Wheel, public API all PASS: #12
• Final post-release 843-case comparison installed the actual release Wheel: CodecCat 826/843 (97.98%) correct Unicode text, chardet 829/843 (98.34%), charset-normalizer 698/843 (82.80%). https://github.com/Johnny-Kao/CodecCat/actions/runs/42158308518
• Before/after held-out source check (same bundled model): GNOME Software 198/225 -> 216/225 correctly decoded, 18 helps and 0 observed harms. https://github.com/Johnny-Kao/CodecCat/actions/runs/42157052821
• Model provenance and SHA256SUMS included for all six released Wheels.

Caveat: The 843-case corpus includes training/development data and is NOT independent population accuracy. Encoding recognition of arbitrary bytes can be ambiguous; new sources cannot prove all legacy codec behavior. CPU/latency rankings are single-run observations. This release is experimental Alpha, not Stable. No PyPI publication.

Methods: https://github.com/Johnny-Kao/CodecCat/blob/main/docs/BENCHMARKS.md