/**
 * The one canonical-JSON serialisation used by every digest this package defines.
 *
 * Two digests depend on it — `canonicalContractDigest` (what "good" means) and
 * `canonicalSubjectDigest` (what was actually checked) — and both must be computed identically
 * by this package AND by Forge, or evidence written by one component silently fails to validate
 * in the other. Sharing one implementation is what makes that guarantee real: a second
 * hand-maintained copy could only ever agree with itself, which is the failure mode a test
 * cannot catch because both copies pass their own tests.
 *
 * Deliberately filesystem-free and side-effect-free. Anything needing real paths, symlink
 * resolution or git state belongs at the server boundary, not here.
 */
/**
 * Compare by Unicode code point. UTF-8's byte order matches code point order, so comparing code
 * points is sufficient and avoids depending on the host's locale-sensitive default collation —
 * `String.prototype.localeCompare` would make the digest environment-dependent.
 */
export declare function compareByCodePoint(a: string, b: string): number;
/**
 * Recursively sort object keys by code point and normalise every string to NFC.
 *
 * ARRAY ORDER IS PRESERVED. Array order is frequently semantic — acceptance criteria run in
 * declared order — so a caller that needs a non-semantic array sorted must sort it BEFORE
 * calling this function, exactly as the contract digest sorts `artifacts` and the subject digest
 * sorts `repositories` and `artifacts`.
 */
export declare function canonicalizeValue(value: unknown): unknown;
/** Canonicalise, encode as UTF-8 JSON with no insignificant whitespace, and digest with SHA-256.
 *  The `sha256:` prefix names the algorithm in the stored value, so a future change is visible in
 *  the data rather than only in the code that produced it. */
export declare function canonicalDigest(content: unknown): string;
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