Release Notes — elicitation 0.11.1
The headline: silencing the cfg warning storm
If you've wired up a crate with #[derive(Elicit)] alongside Kani or Creusot, you've
probably seen the wall of unexpected_cfg warnings that followed. This release eliminates
them.
The root problem is structural: elicitation's derive macro and proof generator emit code
gated on cfg(kani), cfg(creusot), and cfg(verus). When those toolchains aren't active,
Rust rightfully flags the unknown cfg keys. The naive fix — annotate every callsite — doesn't
scale across a generated codebase, and #[allow] attributes are a maintenance smell.
The solution required reaching into the expansion itself. The formal_method proc-macro
expansion now routes all cfg-bearing tokens through an isolated allow module, so the
warnings are suppressed structurally at the point of generation rather than scattered
callsite-by-callsite. The contracted wrapper function is emitted with a clean body, and
tracing instrumentation is correctly gated under #[cfg(not(kani))] so it doesn't appear
in Kani's symbolic execution model. A companion UNEXPECTED_CFGS.md white paper documents
the full suppression strategy for contributors.
This was the majority of the engineering effort in this cycle. The result is a clean build
with any combination of toolchains active.
Cleaner builds, leaner dependencies
elicitation now ships with default = []. The upshot for new users: your build only
compiles what you actually use. Previously, a project that only needed JSON schemas would
silently drag in geo, bevy, wgpu, and two dozen other heavy crates. With granular features,
build times are proportional to what you declare.
The full feature is still available as an explicit opt-in, and dev continues to enable
everything for workspace-level development.
Note: if you're upgrading from 0.11.0, add
features = ["your-feature"]to your
elicitation dependency for any domain types you use. Thefullfeature restores prior
behavior exactly.
As a related bonus: the workspace toolchain is now stable. It had been on
nightly-2026-04-21 purely as a Creusot side-effect; no workspace crate actually needs
#![feature(...)]. cargo creusot manages its own nightly override internally and is
unaffected.
Text IR and rich rendering pipeline
A new intermediate representation for rich text landed across three crates this cycle.
elicit_ui gains RenderContext and RenderVerifiable traits backed by peniko and
parley, establishing a verifiable rendering contract at the GUI layer. elicit_accesskit
picks up a rich_text sidecar on NodeJson, threading structured text into the
accessibility tree. elicit_ratatui completes the pipeline: RenderContext is now
implemented for ratatui::Buffer, and bridge_paragraph renders per-span styled text,
preserving leading whitespace correctly via Wrap { trim: false }.
Middleware and observability
A new middleware module in elicitation provides context propagation and observability hooks
for tool invocations. ObservableCommunicator is now generic over message type, removing the
previous monomorphization constraint. elicit_ratatui gains TuiCommunicator, a
terminal-flavored communicator for interactive elicitation sessions.
Proof infrastructure
The proof-crate generator received several rounds of hardening. Multi-source --crate-path
support landed, allowing a single generator invocation to cover multi-crate workspaces.
why3find.json generation, dependency scanning, and import priority resolution are all
handled automatically. A kani_skip_features option was added for crates whose feature flags
are incompatible with the Kani toolchain.
creusot-std upgraded to 0.11.0 and the vendored copies were removed entirely. The shadow
workspace sanitizer in the Creusot CLI was fixed, and --no-check-version is now passed to
cargo creusot prove for smoother CI runs.
Dependency updates
| Crate | From | To | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
surrealdb / surrealdb-types |
3.0.5 | 3.1.2 | elicit_surrealdb remains workspace-excluded pending upstream geo 0.33 adoption |
rstar |
0.12 | 0.13 | |
anodized |
0.4 | 0.5 | |
creusot-std |
0.10.0 | 0.11.0 | vendored copies removed |
sqlx |
0.9 attempted | 0.8 (reverted) | holding pending upstream stabilization |