The handoff carries the headline and what was left undone

HANDOFF-x86-cost.md

@@ -41,10 +41,24 @@ touches no `(modules ...)` list, so it cannot be pulled into `@runtest` by accid
 `clang: error: linker command failed` lines it prints are the `dev-robust` fixture doing its job and are called
 out in `HANDOFF-x86-rt.md` §4 already.
 
-## 2. The measurement — `spike/x86/cost.sh`, `spike/x86/bench.sh`, `spike/x86/COST.md`
+## 2. The measurement — `spike/x86/COST.md`
 
-`COST.md` is the deliverable and it carries the numbers and the reading of them. The two scripts are how it was
+`COST.md` is the deliverable and it carries the numbers and the reading of them; the raw rows are committed beside
-produced:
+it as `cost-corpus.tsv` and `cost-bench.tsv`. The headline, in one paragraph:
+
+**This backend emits 3.84× the code LLVM does at `-O2`, and 1.92× what LLVM emits at `-O0`** — half the factor is
+the optimiser Flan ships with and not the backend. Per program the second ratio is tight: median 2.21, quartiles
+1.94 and 2.98. Speed is unmeasurable over the corpus (every program is 2.5ms of `execve`) except `recur`, which
+loops ten million times and is **6× LLVM `-O0`**; on purpose-written loops the backend is 2.8× to 4.7×.
+
+Of the five suspected costs the old handoff named, the measurement says: the frame-slot round trip on every
+intermediate is most of everything and is the item worth fixing; `rep movsb` costs twenty cycles a copy and is
+worth fixing cheaply; the bounds check's three temporaries cost 241 bytes and *one cycle*, so they are a code-size
+item and not a speed item; the guard after every call is four instructions and invisible; and the dev build's
+extra load per call site is not measurable at all. What a dev build does cost — 400× the code, because nothing may
+be dropped when anything might be redefined — is `Reach`'s doing and both backends pay it.
+
+The two scripts are how that was produced:
 
 - `cost.sh` sweeps the corpus and prints a TSV: file size, `.text`, and **the sum of the `flan.*` defined symbols**,
   which is the program's own code with the runtime excluded. `COST_FLAGS=--dev` is the `SURVEY_FLAGS` precedent.
@@ -71,3 +85,18 @@ The sweep behind `COST.md` was re-run clean afterwards. If you extend these scri
 No finding here wants a compiler change that this lane was not allowed to make. The costs are all in
 `lib/x86.ml`'s lowering and the next lane rewriting that file will meet them; `COST.md`'s last section says which
 ones are worth its attention and which are not, which was the point of measuring rather than guessing.
+
+## 5. What was not done
+
+- **The `--dev` sweep over the whole corpus was not finished.** It was started, ran into the `dev-*` programs
+  (each of which waits out a twenty-second timeout twice), and was killed to free the machine for the clean
+  release re-run. The `--dev` numbers in `COST.md` come from `bench.sh`, which measures the same thing on four
+  programs and measures it better, because a corpus program's dev cost is invisible under `execve`. Re-running it
+  is `COST_FLAGS=--dev spike/x86/cost.sh` and about half an hour.
+- **No corpus program was disassembled.** The attribution in `COST.md` is all from the four benchmarks, which are
+  small enough to read whole and were written so that each one is mostly a single suspected cost. The corpus
+  outliers are explained from the `-O0` column instead — which is what that column is for, and in `bounds`' case
+  it turns an alarming 11× into an ordinary 2.07×.
+- **`LLVM -O0` is only reachable through `--debug`**, which also asks for DWARF. Checked and harmless: DWARF lands
+  in `.debug_*` and the metric sums `.text` symbols. A plain `-O0` flag on the CLI would be a `bin/main.ml` change
+  and this lane was not touching compiler sources.