The design rationale

The canonical docs (language-design.md, language-grammar.md, official_libraries.md, extensions.md, tooling.md) say what Makoto is. This set says why: why the language exists and why each big decision was made. It is not a tutorial nor an API reference. It is the essay of the reasoning, mined from the design sessions (the real back-and-forth, the rejected alternatives, the pains, the accepted frictions).

Makoto redefines things that other languages take for granted: memory, async, errors, absence, concurrency, strings. Each file below takes one of these concepts and shows the rewrite. What it is in the general world, how Makoto positions itself, the argument, why not the alternatives, the concrete pain, and the mental model the programmer carries.

The documents

#	Document	The redefinition
00	Why Makoto	the thesis: Rust leaks, Go fuses, Makoto separates
01	Philosophy	the root models: opt-in, non-poisoning, boundaries, tiers
02	Memory	colorless: the object carries its strategy, no lifetimes
03	Async and IO	colorless: the process suspends, no async/await
04	Concurrency	shared-nothing: actors + channels + supervision
05	Errors	an error is a value: Result + error-sets; no ?, no exception
06	Absence	no null, no zero-value; absence is typed
07	Types	arbitrary width, decl unifies, structural satisfaction
08	Comptime and reflection	metaprogramming is a library, not magic
09	Strings	explicit unit; comparing is a method because “equal” is ambiguous
10	FFI	@cimport reads the header; all C shouts under c.
11	Ecosystem and tiers	stability comes from the architecture, and who owns the promise
12	Honest names	the name tells the truth about the consequence
13	Verification	guarantees as a ladder you climb one obligation at a time, never a mode you enter

The thread that sews it all together

One sentence reappears in every decision: “you only pay for what you summon” (the opt-in test). And one image governs the entire architecture. The language is made of subsystems that compose because they never stain each other: async does not color the type, memory does not leak strategy, FFI does not pollute the namespace. The name Makoto (誠, “sincerity/truth”) is not decoration. It is the thesis incarnate, the refusal to hide the cost of anything. That is why the doc is honest about what each choice costs (each file names the accepted friction), the same way §1 of the design doc is.