Decision 1. Odin's #load and #load_directory are the model, spelled as
ordinary named calls — an s-expression language already has a head
position and does not need Odin's `#`. (embed "p") is a [u8], (embed "p"
string) is a string, and (embed-dir "d") is a [n EmbedFile] sorted by
name.
Two spellings rather than one that changes type with its context. Odin
threads a type_hint everywhere and can afford it; with structural
equality and no implicit widening, the same text meaning two types here
would be a wart. The path is a literal and resolves relative to the file
the form is written in, both of which are Odin's rules and for Odin's
reasons: the bytes must be in hand before any value exists, and a
package's assets must not depend on where flan was invoked from.
The bytes reach the program as a [Str] node typed [u8], not as a [Bytes]
prim over a string. [Bytes] is identity — emit.ml lowers String and
Slice _ to the same %slice — and wrapping the literal in a prim would
make the node non-constant, so an (embed-dir) bound with defconst could
not be an LLVM constant. Both string emitters take the bytes and ignore
the node's type, so it is the same constant either way and one a global
can hold. emit.ml's escape is byte-exact, so a PNG survives the .ll.
The directory lookup is a linear scan in the prelude over a slice of
EmbedFile. A directory embed is tens of entries out of cache-warm
.rodata, and a compile-time perfect hash would be a build-time map with
its own failure modes that nothing has asked for. Sorted because readdir
order is filesystem-dependent and an unsorted embed would make two
builds of identical sources emit different .ll.
The slice points into .rodata, so a store through it segfaults at -O0
and is deleted at -O2 — the same measured trap the prelude's ASCII-case
note describes for (bytes "Hi"). Inherited, not widened; clone into a
Vec for a mutable copy.
Two element types, one runtime, and the element type appears nowhere below
the call site: size_of and align_of are produced where the concrete type is
known, which without generics is simply the concrete call site. That is
Odin's arrangement and it is what spec-memory.md specifies. `at` and `len`
were already the names for a fixed array and a slice, so a Vec extends them
rather than adding a parallel pair — the asymmetry `nth` was removed for —
and the value form and the place form go through one helper so they cannot
drift apart.
StorageExhausted lands with step 2 rather than after it, because the
signatures depend on it: `push` and `reserve` are Unit, `clone` is the
container, and nothing grows a Result. It is built out of nodes that already
existed — a while, a restart-case and an error — so the backend learned
nothing about allocation. The restart is established at the failing
allocation, which spec-memory.md names as the exception to "restarts go at
the resync point, once", and the element a push was given is bound to a slot
before the loop so a retry re-attempts the allocation and not the expression.
Move-only is a dead set on the checker context, and it is flow-sensitive at
an `if`: both arms start from the same set and the union survives the join,
so `(if c (free v) (free v))` is legal and a one-armed free still kills the
binding. The case a dead set cannot answer is a move inside a loop — merged
once at the end of the body it counts one move, not two — so that is a rule,
refused with its reason.
Four decisions the spec did not settle:
The Vec header is six words in every build, not four in release. A layout
that changes with a build flag can disagree across the reload boundary
silently: a redefinition module is built by llc and ld against a host built
separately, and nothing makes the two agree on a struct size. The 32-byte
release layout is deferred on that.
A zeroed Vec has a null allocator, and the first operation needing storage
adopts the context allocator. Odin's behaviour. The alternative was refusing a
Vec-typed struct field until drop lands; shipping the null was a null deref on
the first push.
A Vec's length and index are i32, like every other length here. Widening
indices is one change across all the containers, not a Vec question.
`let` has no type annotation, so a local Vec has nowhere to say what it holds
and the element type is written at the call: `(vec-new i32)`. This is not the
explicit instantiation syntax the generics section rules out — nothing here is
generic and the name resolves as an ordinary type. Where the context says, it
may be left out.
The allocator grew a budget: a ceiling on live bytes, 0 for none. The retry
restart is only answerable by a handler that can make the *same* request
succeed, and for a fixed backing store the handler that works is the one that
raises the ceiling — releasing the region a container lives in invalidates
the container, which is what the epoch check catches. The spec's "grows the
arena and then invokes retry" needed something to grow.
The generation word is bumped on every reallocation and read by nothing. The
stale-slice trap it is for needs a slice that can carry the Vec's identity,
and a slice is ptr+len. Said plainly rather than implied by the word's
presence.
The gestures testbed declared sinf and cosf at the top of its own file,
which is a copy in every file that wants an angle. The reason sqrt is a
declare does not transplant: IEEE-754 makes sqrt correctly rounded and
requires nothing of the kind for sinf, so these two are the one place in
the prelude where native and wasm32 may disagree bit for bit. That is
written down beside them, along with what the fix would be if a program
ever needs trig that agrees across targets.
Float abs stays unwrapped for the reason integer abs is -- it is
(max x (- 0.0 x)) over two builtins. The integer caveat does not carry
over and the note says so: -0.0 answers +0.0 and a NaN answers a NaN,
both checked.
print-str, print-i64, print-f64, print-bytes, print-line and newline leave
the prelude. print and println are the whole printing surface now, and print
is the better call at every one of the sites that used them: it is the same
structural walk without the newline, so the no-newline case the family was
kept for is covered, and it takes the value as it is. The old print-i64
forced an explicit (i64 x) at every call site, because this language widens
nothing implicitly; that cast is gone from 127 places.
Dropping it moves one answer. hash-grid returns u64, and the cast through
the signed printer showed sand-headless's hash as -2851001042534928384.
print routes a u64 through flan_u64_to_bytes, so it now prints
15595743031174623232 — the same 64 bits, read as the unsigned number they
are. The pinned expectation follows the correction.
test-flan-dev.el and test_session.ml both reached for print-line as "a name
the prelude has"; they reach for rand-seed instead.
session.ml already had this: a compile-time walk over a Tast type that
emits the calls to print a value of it, handling every concrete type the
language has. It was dev-build-only and went to flan_dev_emit, and
prelude.ml justified the per-type print-* functions by saying a real
println had to wait for milestone 5 and generics. It did not. plan.org
specifies println as compiler-provided and per concrete type, which is
not overloading: there is nothing to dispatch on at run time and no
user-supplied printer to choose between, so no type variables appear.
The walk moves to render.ml, parameterised on an emitter and a slot
allocator. The emitter is five functions rather than five extern names
because the two sides are not both extern calls -- the REPL's are, and
stdout's compose a conversion with a write. The slot allocator differs
too: the REPL builds a thunk's frame, println takes slots from the
enclosing function being checked, once per call site.
Two runtime shims, both only reachable from the walk. flan_u64_to_bytes,
because routing u64 through the signed printer makes 0xFFFF...F read as
-1, which is the one way println could disagree with the REPL about a
value both can hold. flan_escape_bytes, so a string nested in a printed
structure is quoted and escaped -- same table as flan_dev_emit_str, noted
in both, because the REPL and println must not disagree about what a
struct looks like.
A string at top level prints raw and nested prints quoted. Not a conflict:
(println "hello") has to print hello, and a struct's string field has to
be distinguishable from the punctuation around it. The split is top-level
vs nested, so it lives in check.ml and not in the walk.
Found on the way: a field of an Option had no gep in emit.ml, so the
walk's Option arm had never run -- the REPL would have failed on one too.
Option is { i8, T } with no declared name, so its layout is now spelled
out. Nothing in the surface language reaches a field of an Option; the
printer does, to read the tag without unwrapping a None.
The print-* functions stay. They print without a newline, which println
cannot express -- slices.flan's show prints elements separated by spaces
-- and they are raw where print is structural.
println.flan covers every arm at -O0 and -O2: the u64, the raw/quoted
split, both Option arms, the depth and span caps, and the slice arm's
loop twice over plus once inside a dotimes, which is where per-call-site
slot allocation would show if it were per-iteration.
encode-rune! says nothing is written when it answers None, and every None case
in the table passed that claim without testing it: an encoder that lays the
lead byte down and only then notices the buffer is short returns None exactly
as a correct one does. So a known byte goes into scratch, a refused encoding
is asked for, and the byte is read back. Storing before the length test turns
the line from 65 -1 65 -1 65 into 65 -1 0 -1 0.
The read-only claim beside lower-ascii was reasoned from the emitted linkage
rather than observed, and observing it was worse than the guess. With
(set (at (bytes "Hi") 0) \h): at -O0 the store is emitted against the constant
and the program takes SIGSEGV; at -O2 LLVM deletes it as undefined behaviour
and the program prints "Hi" and exits 0. The same source either dies or
silently does nothing depending on a flag. The comment now says that instead
of predicting a segfault.
Odin's core/strings and all of core/fmt take an allocator; core/unicode/utf8
does not, because decoding is classification and every answer is a number.
That line is where the port stops, and the refusals at the foot of the file
say so by name rather than leaving a caller to find out.
The accept_sizes table becomes a cond over the lead byte. Its four awkward
rows are the ones a hand-written decoder gets wrong one at a time, so they are
written out: 0xc0/0xc1 lead nothing, 0xe0 and 0xf0 have a raised second-byte
floor against overlongs, 0xed has a lowered ceiling against the surrogates.
Two divergences from Odin, both the parse-i64 argument again. A malformed
sequence carries ok:false instead of decoding to U+FFFD, which is a real code
point a caller cannot tell from a failure; and encode-rune! answers None
rather than silently substituting U+FFFD for a rune it was not given. Width
stays 1 on a bad byte, which is Odin's rule and load-bearing: every loop here
advances by it, and a 0 would hang rather than answer wrong.
split cannot return a sequence it would have to own, so the cursor is what
survives. It follows the allocating strings.split rather than Odin's own
iterator, which drops a trailing empty field and disagrees with it.
Case conversion is byte-wise and not in place: a literal is emitted into
read-only memory, so lowering (bytes "Hi") would type check and segfault.
floor, ceil and round over f32, which is what a position and a tile coordinate
are here. The only rounding mode available is the cast's truncation toward
zero, so each of these is that cast plus the correction the mode does not
make, and the content is which inputs make the cast itself undefined. NaN
fails every comparison, so it needs its own (not (= x x)) and nothing else
finds it; the infinities fall out of the magnitude test; and above 2^23 an f32
has no fractional bits left, which makes returning the input there the exact
answer and also the guard that keeps the cast inside i32.
round is half away from zero, written as floor of the magnitude and mirrored.
The obvious (floor-f32 (+ x 0.5)) is wrong twice: half-up rather than
half-away, so -2.5 comes out -2, and at the largest f32 below 0.5 the addition
alone rounds to 1.0 and answers 1 for a number under a half. Both are in the
table, which is why every case there is a negative or a half.
sqrt is the decision in this commit and it goes out to libm, which is a change
to the release link and so is said out loud. Every other number in the prelude
is reachable from the four operations and a cast; a square root is not.
Newton's method needs a starting guess, the good guess comes from
reinterpreting the exponent bits, and the language has only value-preserving
casts - no bit-cast between f32 and u32. Without one the iteration needs a
scaling loop to normalise and still produces a result that is merely close,
which is the one thing a standard library must not hand back. IEEE-754 makes
sqrt correctly rounded, so libm's answer is the same bit pattern on native and
on wasm32; for this function the byte-identical argument points at C rather
than away from it.
The cost is -lm on every link, and its placement matters. It goes after the
objects, not in the leading flags, because --as-needed drops a library named
before the object that wants it. Worse, at -O2 LLVM folds most sqrtf calls
into the hardware instruction and the symbol never has to resolve - so this
looked linked before the flag existed and failed only at -O0, which is exactly
why the table runs both. Untested against --target=wasm32: wasi-libc ships
libm.a as a stub because the symbols live in libc, so it should be inert
there, but nothing here exercises it.
The better fix is not in this lane. llvm.sqrt.f32 as a builtin in check.ml and
emit.ml is one instruction, no symbol and no flag, and it belongs to whoever
owns the compiler.
Finishing the text family the previous lane started. All three are over [u8]
and none of them allocates, which is what decides their shapes.
trim answers a slice of its input. That is the only shape available without an
allocator, and it is also the better one: there is no new storage, only a
narrower view of the caller's, so the result dies with its owner and trimming
modifies nothing. Both loops test (< lo hi), because an all-whitespace input
otherwise walks lo past hi and (slice s lo hi) traps on a reversed range - the
same trap the bounds table already asserts on. That input is in the case list.
index-of-bytes is naive and stays naive. Boyer-Moore wants a skip table sized
by the needle, which is an array, which is an allocation. The empty needle
answers Some 0 so that index-of-bytes and starts-with? agree on every needle,
and the length test returns before the loop so a needle longer than the
haystack cannot build a window off the end.
parse-f64 splits the work where the two halves actually differ: the grammar is
Flan's and the rounding is libc's. parse-i64 is entirely Flan because strtoll's
answers are wrong for a caller - 0 for "", 0 for "abc", 12 for "12x" - and not
because decimal-to-binary conversion is suspect. Reimplementing correctly
rounded conversion is a different and much larger problem than rejecting junk,
and IEEE-754 already guarantees strtod gives the same bits everywhere. So this
validates the whole slice and only a slice that is entirely a number reaches
bytes->f64. Every refusal in the table - "", "abc", "1x", ".", "1e", " 1",
"1 ", "0x10", "nan" - is a plausible number out of strtod.
Two caveats, both written into the source rather than discovered later. The
locale worry that keeps parse-i64 in Flan does apply to strtod's decimal point,
and is moot only because nothing in the runtime calls setlocale; if that stops
being true this is what breaks. And the length is capped at 511 because
flan_bytes_to_f64 truncates there - a validator that approved 600 digits would
be approving a different number than the one strtod reads.
digit? and space? exist because parse-f64 and trim need them, and calc-me loses
its own byte-identical digit?. One top-level namespace makes the second
definition an error rather than a shadow, which is the rule doing its job: two
copies that later drift apart is exactly what it prevents.
Finishing the 2D lane's unfinished work: the collision family was written and
had no tests when the session ended. It is the best material a headless table
gets, since every one of these is pure and needs no GL context.
Two plausible tests in a row turned out to check nothing, and that is the part
worth keeping. A struct round trip is symmetric and passes for any field order -
the texture lane found that one. The second is subtler: no axis-aligned geometry
can pin Vector2's fields, because exchanging x and y is a reflection that is
applied on the way in and undone on the way out. Swapping the shim's own typedef
leaves every collision case passing. Distances never even see it.
What does pin Vector2 is the rotated camera, because a rotation is not
axis-aligned and does not commute with the reflection. That case is load-bearing
and the comment now says so, because the collision cases look like they cover
the same ground and do not.
What the new cases do pin is Rectangle, completely: swapping width and height
turns three of the four predicates the wrong way. Verified by doing it.
collision-lines answers (Option Vector2) rather than a bool and an
out-parameter, because raylib leaves the out-parameter untouched when the
segments do not meet and a caller who forgets reads whatever was there.
bytes->i64 is strtoll behind a primitive, and strtoll returns 0 for "", for
"abc", for a lone "-", and for the "12" in "12x". None of those is
distinguishable from a real 0, so any program that parses input it did not
write is already wrong and has no way to find out. parse-i64 takes the whole
slice or refuses it and says so with None. It is also the version that answers
the same on wasm32: strtoll is libc's and locale-sensitive, which is the same
argument that put the PRNG in the prelude rather than leaving it to rand().
The byte predicates are over [u8] rather than over string on purpose. (bytes s)
is one call at the call site, and in exchange one copy of each function serves
strings and byte slices both — which is as near a generic as this gets. Each
tests its length before it slices, and `and` short-circuits, so a prefix longer
than the subject answers false instead of tripping the slice bounds check.
sign-f32 and lerp are the only two numeric helpers here, because they are the
only two that decide something. clamp is (min hi (max lo x)) and abs is
(max x (- 0 x)) over builtins that already exist — a prelude wrapper is a
function emitted into every program to save a caller nothing. sign-f32 answers
0.0 for NaN, which is a choice and is written down. lerp is the weighted sum
and not a + t*(b - a): the latter does not land on b exactly at t = 1.0, and a
position that never quite arrives is what interpolation gets bug reports for.
floor, ceil and round are deliberately absent. (f32 (i32 x)) is fptosi, which
is poison out of range, and shipping that as a documented limitation is the
same class of bug NEXT.md already records twice under Sharp edges. Correct
lowering is llvm.floor.f32 in emit.ml, which is not this lane. sqrt is absent
for a different reason: it is an extern to libm, and what libm means on wasm32
is a decision the FFI owns, not the prelude.
rand-i32-range answers lo for an empty or reversed range rather than dividing
by zero, which is immediate undefined behaviour and not merely a wrong number.
Both range functions draw exactly one rand-u32 and neither changes it, so the
sand hash still pins the generator; the new test pins the derivations off a
fixed seed, which nothing else would have caught.
A sequence library normally returns new sequences. There is no allocator, so
every one of these mutates the storage it was handed and a slice is the handle
that makes that useful: (slice grid 4 9) is ptr+len into grid, so sorting it
sorts those five elements and leaves the rest of grid alone. The test asserts
exactly that — it sorts a subslice and prints the whole owning array — because
it is the property that would die silently the day a slice parameter started
being copied rather than passed by value, and -O2's mem2reg would hide it.
Insertion sort rather than anything faster. Quicksort wants a stack and
mergesort wants a buffer, and neither exists; insertion sort needs a swap and
two indices. It is also the only one of the three whose inner loop is short
enough to read, which matters more than the asymptotics on the slice sizes a
frame loop actually sorts. The `and` guarding it short-circuits, and that is
load-bearing: at j = 0 the left test fails and (at s -1) is never evaluated,
so the bounds check never fires.
Over [i32] and nothing else. There are no generics, so a second element type
is a second copy of all seven functions emitted into every program that links
the prelude, and i32 is the type indices, ids and tile values already have.
An f32 set waits for a program that wants one.
min-i32 and max-i32 return (Option i32) rather than a sentinel because there
is no i32 that means "the slice was empty" and is not also a possible element.
sum-i32 accumulates in i64 and widens each element explicitly — there is no
implicit widening anywhere, and an i32 total over a screenful of i32 is how a
sum wraps without anyone noticing.
