flan build --target=web produces a page, its JS and a .wasm. The two wasm
targets share the word and almost nothing else, so is_wasi and is_web are
separate predicates and is_wasm is their union — the union is exactly the
facts about the machine, 32-bit pointers and no dlopen, which is what the
refusals are about.
Everything the wasi target has to find by hand is what emcc already is: no
sysroot, no builtins archive, no shadow resource directory, and no
__main_argc_argv shim, because emscripten's start code calls main under that
name. target_flags for web is empty and the only thing checked is that emcc
exists. The one fact this rests on is that emcc takes a .ll on its command
line, so Emit's output needs no change.
The main loop is -sASYNCIFY rather than emscripten_set_main_loop, which
BUILT.md predicted. The prediction had the browser right and the cost wrong:
set_main_loop wants the loop body as a callback, so every example that writes
(until (rl/window-should-close?) ...) would be split by hand into an init and
a tick and would stop being the native program. raylib's web platform is built
for asyncify instead — WindowShouldClose on PLATFORM_WEB is an
emscripten_sleep(16) that returns false — so the loop yields at a call it
already makes and no example changed a character. Asyncify goes on every web
link, because whether a program blocks is not a question Build can answer and
a per-program flag set is a per-program cache key.
A link line may now be addressed to one target — @native, @wasi, @web — and
${NAME} expands from the environment. The selection is here and not in Load,
which reads the file, because Load resolves imports before a target is chosen.
The object cache now keys on whichever compiler the target uses, so an emcc
object and a clang one of the same source cannot collide. The refusals name
the target that was asked for; --sanitize on web says the weaker truth, that
emscripten ships an ASan and nothing here has ever run it.
layout searched only Tast.structs, so a declared union came back as "no struct
is named X" — which reads as "that type does not exist" about a type the
checker knows. Refused by kind beside the enum, and both refusals now have a
test: a new enum and a new union, evaluated into the session.
(:op "layout" :type T) needs no running program: the daemon owns the build, so
Tast.structs is already in the session it compiled the process from. The open
question was what T is, and it needs no new machinery — Load qualifies every
declaration at import, so two packages' Missing are a/Missing and b/Missing and
the name is the type id. Emit already writes that same qualified name into
flan_error, so the string break reports as :condition resolves as :type by
construction, which is the round trip the test makes.
A bare name is refused with the candidates rather than resolved to a unique
suffix: resolving it would put back the ambiguity the rule exists to remove.
ASan was instrumenting none of the Flan half: it is an LLVM pass that
only touches functions carrying sanitize_address, which clang's C
frontend adds and hand-written IR does not. Globals get redzones either
way, which is why it looked right. emit.ml puts the attribute on every
define now, and a control asserts the report.
UBSan reaches no Flan code and no flag changes that -- its checks are
frontend-emitted branches, not a pass -- so shift UB and the NaN cast are
not answerable this way. Left as a compiler question, pinned by a control
that must not report.
sin and cos in the prelude rather than copied per file, with the caveat
sqrt does not have: IEEE-754 makes sqrt correctly rounded and requires
nothing of the kind for sine, so these are the one place the prelude may
disagree bit for bit between native and wasm32. A program hashing output
across targets must not route the hash through one.
Arithmetic folds left over as many operands as you write, and so does the
constant folder, which otherwise refused (defconst n (* 2 3 4)) after the
checker had accepted it. One operand is refused by name: there is no unary
minus, and the message points at (- 0 x), which is what the prelude writes.
The typed let binding is a grammar question and is written up rather than
guessed at. The break banner premise had gone stale -- check.sh already
runs that demo under a timeout and keeps what it printed.
defconst's folder matched a call of exactly two arguments, so once
arithmetic went n-ary a length written (* 2 3 4) type-checked as an
expression and was then refused as "not a compile-time integer
constant" -- a form that looks constant, is constant, and was told it
was not. Same left fold, same operators, and % stays at two because it
does in the checker.
ASan is an LLVM pass but instruments only functions carrying
sanitize_address, which clang's C frontend adds and nothing adds to IR
written by hand. Passing -fsanitize=address to the clang run over the
.ll therefore instruments flan_rt.c and not one instruction of Flan: an
out-of-bounds read of a defvar array, built --no-bounds-checks, printed
its garbage and exited 0. With Emit naming an attribute group on every
define, the same program reports global-buffer-overflow in flan.main.
UBSan has no such lever. Its checks are branches the C frontend emits to
__ubsan_handle_*, not a pass, so -fsanitize=undefined covers the runtime
and nothing else; (<< 1 32) still goes unremarked. Recorded where it
will be read rather than discovered again.
The flag does not force -O0 the way --debug does -- the UB worth finding
is what the optimiser does with it -- and it does pull in -g, since a
report with no line costs more than the build. compile_c's cache key now
digests the same cflags list the command line uses, because an
unsanitized flan_rt.o served out of the cache links fine and reports
nothing.
Arithmetic, min/max and the three bitwise combining operators take two
operands or more now and fold left, which is what the examples were
already writing. The first pair still goes through `binary`, so the rule
about which side decides the type is unchanged for every call that was
already legal, and each operand after it is checked against that type.
min and max fold their own way: every step puts both sides in slots, the
accumulated pick included, so three operands are two nested lets and each
is still evaluated exactly once. Reusing the previous `if` as an operand
of the next would have copied everything inside it.
Three things stay at two operands, each for its own reason. A chain of
remainders is not something anyone writes on purpose; a chain of shifts
would pass two counts that are each legal for the width and still shift
the value away entirely. And a single operand is refused rather than
guessed: there is no unary minus in this language -- the prelude writes
every negation as (- 0 n) -- and no reciprocal, so both say so and name
the form to write instead.
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.
A [u8] and a string are the same 16 bytes at run time, so (string b)
is a reinterpretation with no instructions. What it buys is that a
number can reach draw-text at all, which five of the ten examples
wanted and none could have.
A let-bound local is its own name under lldb now, and a redefinition
module carries DWARF when the daemon was asked for it.
Resolved against the println track in session.ml: the thunk keeps the
render walk's appended slots and gains the names beside them, the walk's
own scratch having none to keep.
(string b) is the mirror of (bytes s) and costs nothing: emit.ml already
lowers Types.String and Types.Slice _ to the same %slice, 16 bytes at
align 8, so a string and a [u8] are the identical value at run time and
both directions emit as the argument itself. What changes is only what
the checker will let the value be passed to — which was the whole gap.
Two decisions, both written into check.ml's comment.
It does not check UTF-8, because `string` does not claim UTF-8. The
prelude settles it: valid-utf8? is an ordinary function you call when you
care, decode-rune / rune-at / rune-count all take [u8] and not string,
and decode-rune answers {:ok false :width 1} on a malformed byte rather
than assuming well-formed input. The one place the runtime treats a
string differently from a byte slice is flan_escape_bytes, for a string
nested in a printed structure, and that is a byte-wise escape table with
no decoding in it. A check here would be the only enforcement point in
the language, which is a claim the rest of it does not make.
It does not widen the literal-write hole. That hole is the other
direction — (bytes "Hi") hands back a writable-looking slice over
constant data — and this direction only loses the ability to write, so
the result reaches strictly fewer stores than its argument could.
Provenance is still what the other direction needs; nothing here waits
on it.
The one sharp edge is not new but is easier to trip over now, and is
recorded in both the checker and digits.flan: i64->bytes, f64->bytes and
u64->bytes all view the same static buffer in the runtime, overwritten
by the next call, and calling it a string does not copy it. Format, draw,
then format the next one.
examples/digits.flan keeps its three signatures and loses its middle: the
[10 string] table, the per-glyph pen and the digit arithmetic are gone,
and draw-int is one draw-text. What survives is the part (string ...)
does not answer — i64->bytes has no field width, so "%03i" is still
assembled, and f64->bytes is "%g", so fixed decimal places are still a
split into two integers. core-input-multitouch and
core-input-virtual-controls ignored the width they were given, so both
inline the draw and stop importing digits.flan entirely.
test/programs/string-of-bytes.flan at -O2 and -O0: a number round-tripped,
an empty slice, sub-views whose length is not the underlying storage's,
and the result across a declare-c boundary. The last is the one that
could have been wrong — "hello world" cut to five bytes has a space where
C wants a NUL, so a shim that trusted the bytes would print all eleven.
Emit.redefinition has taken ~debug since it was written and was tested
with it; Session.eval never passed it, so every body installed by C-c C-c
lost its debug info in the running process.
Passing it alone would have been half a fix. Build.shared is what forces
-O0, and dev.ml built modules at -O2, so the llvm.dbg.declares would have
been emitted and then deleted by mem2reg: a line table, and no locals.
And a module with DWARF loaded into a host without it lines up against
nothing. So it is one flag — flan dev --debug and flan reload --debug —
and it sets the host build, the module builds and the emitted metadata
together. Off by default: a debug build is an -O0 build, and quietly
making every reloaded body -O0 changes the frame time of the one function
you are iterating on, in the loop whose point is watching that number.
What a dlopen'd module does to a breakpoint, measured against the reload
fixture rather than reasoned about:
- lldb reads the new module's DWARF on the dlopen and says so: "1
location added to breakpoint 3".
- A breakpoint set by NAME gains a second location either way, so
dlopen was never the difficulty. What the line table buys is that it
stops with source instead of disassembly.
- A FILE AND LINE breakpoint on the new body resolves only with it;
without, it sits at locations = 0 (pending) forever.
- A FILE AND LINE breakpoint on the HOST's copy stays pinned at
locations = 1. That is correct, not stale: the old body is still
mapped and every call site that has not gone through its cell again
still reaches it.
- The stack crosses intact — a frame in the reloaded .so and the one
below it in the host each name their own .flan file.
(lldb) frame variable
(long) step = 10
(long) prior = 11
The transcripts are in flan-dape.el, replacing the note that said the
module carries no DWARF yet.
flan-cnr.el's stack pane was refusing for the wrong reason. DWARF was
never its gap; nothing is attached to the stopped program, and a socket
cannot read another process's frames. Reworded to say that.
Source interleaving in the disassembly buffer is unblocked and not done:
objdump -dS interleaves a --debug module's Flan source correctly, so
Dev.asm_of needs the -S and a parse_listing that tolerates source lines.
A let-bound local printed as s0 under lldb. Parameters were fine, because
the driver recovered their names from the AST and handed them down in
pnames; everything else was a slot index, since Check knew the name in its
scope list and dropped it at allocation.
Tast.fn now carries snames beside slots, Check fills it in at bind, and
Emit prefers it over pnames. A slot the compiler invented keeps s<index>:
fresh_slot takes the name as an optional argument, so dotimes' hidden
bound and the pair min and max evaluate into say nothing and get None
without any of their call sites changing. Naming those something plausible
would put a variable in the debugger that is not in the file.
Shadowing needed deciding rather than assuming. Every DILocalVariable is
scoped to the subprogram — the typed IR has no block structure to build a
DILexicalBlock from — so two slots called v landed in one flat scope, and
lldb answered p v with the outer one while the body computed with the
inner, which it did not list at all. A debugger confident and wrong is the
one outcome worse than s0, so a repeat of a name already bound in this
function gets a ~2 suffix: ~ is the reader's delimiter and cannot occur in
a source symbol, so v~2 is unambiguous and visibly the compiler's. It is a
way of not lying, not a way of being right; scoping properly means a
lexical block per Let and the declares moved out of the entry block.
(lldb) breakpoint set --file debug.flan --line 20
(lldb) frame variable
(Cell *) c = 0x00007fffffffd970
(int) n = 41
(int) bump = 42
The test breaks after the binding on purpose. A name breakpoint stops on
the function's first line, before the let has stored anything, and a
variable is nominally in scope from entry — so the name is checked there
and the value only where it means something.
A restart the innermost frame shadows could be seen and not taken;
it is taken by position now, off a snapshot that stopped moving under
the break loop. The editor half this was briefed as building already
existed — the stale line that said otherwise is fixed.
Two frames offering `retry` put both on the break loop's list and only the
inner one within reach: §4's walk takes the first frame offering a name, by
definition, so the outer clause was drawn, offered, and unreachable. The old
prompt showed `retry` twice and sent the string either way. An index is the
only thing that can say which one, which is why SBCL identifies them
positionally too.
An index is worthless against a stack that moves, though, and this one moves:
the break loop is the poll loop, so every restart-case an evaluation enters
pushes and pops the same global list between the listing and the choice. So
the list is read once on entry and copied — names into the agent's own buffer,
frames as the addresses a transfer carries — and every answer comes from that.
The name still travels with the index as a receipt, checked against the
snapshot and refused if the two have drifted, so a bare integer can be wrong
out loud.
And the third state. A restart below the thunk a break is inside was accepted,
announced, and silently not taken: `flan_reload_call` holds its own transfer
channel and drops it on return, so the unwind stops at the thunk. The boundary
is now recorded where it is made, at the call — frames a restart-case inside
the thunk pushes are above it and still work — and such a restart is listed,
marked, and refused with the reason.
`break.flan` grew the shadowed pair, and 900 is a value no by-name lookup in
that file can produce.
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.
nth and at were documented as the same operation, and as reads they were:
check.ml matched "at" | "nth" in one arm. But a place is recovered in two
other spots -- parse.ml for (set ...) and place_of_expr for (addr ...) --
and both match only Sym "at". So (set (nth a i) x) and (addr (nth a i))
were refused while the at forms worked.
Two names said to be identical that disagree about writing is worse than
one name, and the asymmetry is not worth fixing in three places to keep a
synonym. at is the indexing operation; nth is gone.
The six call sites were all reads, so they rewrite directly. get/put stay
the Map pair: get returns (Option V) and is deliberately not a place.
nth-gone.flan pins the removal -- it has to fail as a name nobody defined,
not quietly resolve to at again.
destructure~nth is compiler-generated and unrelated.
A stopped program was said not to have installed what was delivered. The
commonest way to stop is to install a body and have it error, so that
asserted non-installation in precisely the case where the body is running;
the daemon cannot read a cell back either way, and now says that. What is
certain is only that nothing further installs until it resumes.
And the source location came from the session rather than from the build it
was showing. Session.eval replaces the checked program the moment a form
checks — before the build, before delivery — so an evaluation that checked
and then failed to build left a reply showing the host's code, saying
nothing had been delivered, and pointing at a buffer whose code never
landed. A daemon whose llc is [false] is the whole test.
They came back as "unknown function break", which reads as a typo rather than
as a missing feature. plan.org's loop story is settled as imperative while/for
with break, continue and return, so these are named, planned and absent - and
they alter control flow, which is the first thing the house rule says must be
recognised explicitly rather than left to fall through to a call.
Found by the lane writing the documentation site, which had to describe the
loop forms and discovered two of them were neither implemented nor refused.
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.
The parser decides "return type or first body form?" from the set of type
names the file declares, and an import is resolved after parsing - so a
package's structs cannot be in that set by construction. (defn mk [] rl/Vector2
...) therefore read the return type as the body and failed with "unknown name
rl/Vector2", which names the symptom and not the cause.
The signal is the alias plus the capital, and both halves are needed. An alias
is syntactically obvious and the same pre-pass collects it. A bare capitalised
symbol is never a value in this language - a struct or union constructor is
(Name {...}), a List, and an enum member is a keyword - so the hazard the
surrounding comment warns about, a body form eaten as a return type, has no
form of this shape to eat. A lowercase qualified name stays an expression,
which is what rl/get-color has to be.
Found by the raylib lane, which hit it on rl/Vector2 and reported it rather
than reaching into a file it did not own.
An editor could see the IR of a whole file and nothing at all of what the
running process is executing. The daemon built every module it sent, so
objdump on the right object is the disassembly and the retained .ll is the
IR; the only hard part is which module owns a name after N reloads, and a
table filled on accepted delivery answers it.
What it deliberately does not claim is that the code shown is installed.
The agent takes a module path and answers ok when it has queued one; there
is no verb that reads a cell back, so :basis spells out which of the three
things is true — the host's body, still certain because nothing was ever
delivered; queued and awaiting a frame boundary; or queued while the
program is stopped and therefore certainly not installed yet.
From SBCL: offsets from the function's start rather than addresses into a
file, and L0.. labels on branch targets. Not source interleaving, which
needs line tables this build does not emit, so the reply says so.
A module's .ll is deleted by the build and the host's lives in a working
directory named after the process rather than the module, so ten reloads
in there is nothing left on disk that says what a given function was
compiled from. The daemon owns the build and is the only thing that could
have kept it, so it keeps it: one .ll beside each .so, and a table from
function name to the last module that carried a body for it.
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.
Two ways to write a match over an enum and two different refusals, neither
of them true. (match k :lo ...) died in the parser with "expected a pattern,
found :hi" — which arm it named depended on cons evaluation order, and it
never mentioned enums. (match k lo ...) died in the checker blaming milestone
2, which is not what stands in the way.
What stands in the way is worth writing down, because the feature is close.
An enum is an i32 at run time and its members are all known, so the arms are
a chain of (= k :member) and the exhaustiveness check falls out of env.enums
— a desugaring, no new IR node, the same shape as everything else this lane
landed. What is missing is a case in Ast.pattern for a keyword, and load.ml
matches that type exhaustively with no wildcard, so the variant cannot be
added from a session that does not own the file. One line, for whoever does.
That is also why destructuring went through a call to an unspellable name
instead: a name in call position is an open namespace check.ml already owns,
whereas tagging Pctor with ":lo" would put a second meaning into a field
another file destructures as a constructor.
The struct-tail case in the acceptance program is unrelated housekeeping: the
corpus slices arrays of i32, u8 and f32 and nothing wider, so nothing else
proves the desugared (slice xs n (len xs)) gets a struct's stride right.
--debug is a third flag beside --dev and the optimisation level because it
answers a third question. --dev is "can I redefine this while it runs";
--debug is "can I stop it and read it". Either is useful without the other,
and a REPL session that is not being stepped should not pay for DWARF.
Not implied by -O0 in particular, for a reason already written down in this
file: the acceptance table runs the same programs at -O0 and -O2 to compare
the emitted IR against what mem2reg makes of it. If -O0 pulled in debug info,
every one of those comparisons would be against a different module.
It does imply -O0 downwards, and sets it. The whole mechanism is an
llvm.dbg.declare hanging off an alloca, and mem2reg deletes the alloca.
Refused for wasm32 by name. The member offsets in the DWARF are computed for
the host — ptr is 8 bytes — and wasm32's pointer is 4, so a slice's len sits
at byte 8 there and byte 16 here. Emitting the host numbers would hand a
debugger a confident wrong answer for every slice and every struct holding
one, which is the exact failure this project keeps meeting at the FFI
boundary. Silence would be worse than the refusal.
-g reaches the C compiles too, and joins compile_c's digest key with it, or
an object built without it would be served to a build that asked for it.
plan.org says Flan is Clojure's brackets and a small slice of its API, and
(let [{:keys [x y]} p] ...) is one of the most-used parts of that surface.
A struct is Flan's map, so {:keys [x y]} and {inner :field} read fields off
one; [a b] and [a b & rest] read a fixed array.
It desugars in parse.ml into the Let bindings and Field accesses that already
exist — the same trade dotimes makes. Ast.binding carries a name and nothing
else, so nothing downstream learns that a pattern exists: not Load's renaming,
not Check, not a backend. That is not only taste. Load matches Ast.pattern
exhaustively and Shim builds Ast.binding literally, and neither file is
editable from here, so an AST variant was never on the table.
The value goes into a temporary first. A pattern over a call must call it
once, and (let [{:keys [p]} p] ...) must read the old p rather than the one
it is halfway through rebinding. The temporaries are named with a ~, which
the reader treats as a delimiter, so no source symbol can collide with one.
The arity is the one thing the parser cannot settle — it is a type — so the
pattern's shape travels to check.ml as destructure~nth, which knows how many
elements the value has and lowers to an ordinary at.
Every Tast node carries a Loc and nothing ever used one outside an error
message, so a Flan program under a debugger was a wall of addresses. This
emits DWARF for them.
The reason it is a few hundred lines and not a few thousand is the layout.
A Flan struct is its C struct, every slot is an alloca and there are no tag
words, so there is nothing to describe *about Flan* — DW_LANG_C99 and the
machine types are the honest answer, and lldb's own C support is then exactly
right for a Flan value.
Two things are load-bearing and neither is obvious:
Debug Info Version in llvm.module.flags. Without it LLVM drops every scrap of
debug metadata with no diagnostic at all, so the build succeeds and the
debugger shows nothing and there is no thread to pull.
A !dbg on every instruction, not only the ones that want a line. The verifier
rejects a call without a location inside a function that has debug info, and
this file emits calls from a dozen places — the bounds failure, the handler
push and pop, the transfer guards — none of which would have remembered to
ask. So the location lives on the per-function state and `ins` appends it.
The member offsets are computed here rather than handed to LLVM, which is the
one place in this backend that happens and so the one place a layout bug can
hide. !DIDerivedType takes offset: as an integer literal; the ptrtoint-of-gep
form this file uses elsewhere for a size is not accepted in metadata. The
acceptance test therefore checks each one against LLVM's own getelementptr
answer for the same struct type, not against a table written by the same hand.
Local names are the gap. The typed IR refers to slots by index and records no
names — Check has them and drops them — so a parameter gets its source name,
recovered by the driver from declarations already in hand, and everything else
gets s<index>, which is the slot it actually is. Closing that means Tast
carrying the name.
The transient marker said nothing outside the module points into it once the
call returns - true of its text, silent about its data. A string literal is
emitted into the evaluating module's own image and an expression may store one
anywhere: C-x C-e on (set msg "tuned") left a program global pointing into the
mapping the agent was about to drop. The next thunk can be mapped at the same
address, so what comes back is silent garbage rather than a fault, and nothing
in the compiler refused it.
The third condition is that the module emitted no string constants. Then there
is nothing in its image anyone could still be pointing at. One that did keeps
its mapping, which costs a page and is the bargain every redefinition already
makes.
Found by reading jank, which has met the neighbouring hazard from the other
side: its notes are explicit that nothing is ever unloaded, and the one place
Flan makes an exception is the one place the rule had a hole.
vendor/raylib has no C in it any more: shim.c is deleted and its 84 wrappers
are emitted from declare-c, which names the library's function in the library's
own signature. The reason the shim exists is unchanged - a small struct's
calling convention is a per-target classification and clang reproduces it for
free - but writing it by hand has stopped.
declare-c is a second form rather than a change to declare, because the two make
opposite claims about the same shape: (declare start-raw [path string] ...) says
the symbol takes ptr+len, and (declare-c init-window [... title string] ...)
says it takes a NUL-terminated char*. No structural rule separates them, so the
author says which.
The merge needed two fixes that neither lane could have found alone.
Load's uses-walker matches decl_kind exhaustively and did not know DeclareC, so
the reachability work and the generator did not compile together.
And the generated C is now emitted in parts keyed by the wrapper's own C symbol,
not as one translation unit. Reach.link drops the bindings nothing reachable
calls; a single TU holding every wrapper referenced every raylib symbol, so
sand-headless - which deliberately links no libraylib, and is the reason Reach
exists - failed at the link with undefined references to GetTime and its
neighbours. The first attempt keyed the parts by Flan name and broke the other
way, dropping a wrapper that was called: the flattened declaration is named
foo-c when a Flan wrapper is generated over it and foo when none is needed, so
the Flan name is not one thing. The wrapper's C symbol is what the declaration
binds in both branches.
Worth recording how close that came to passing: the acceptance suite died with
an exception rather than printing FAIL, so a grep for failures counted zero and
the suite looked green. Only the count of reporting suites - ten where there had
been eleven - showed it.
Two gaps in what was claimed. The first is prose: "the typedef follows the
defstruct" answers field order and field types but says nothing about
padding, which reads like the remaining hazard. It is not one. Every field
type the generator admits has the same layout under LLVM as under C, and
emit.ml writes no datalayout, so clang applies the target's own rules to
both halves; everything where they could diverge — an array, a slice, an
Option, a map, a union — is already refused at the field.
The second is real. The flattened declaration's name is invented by
appending -c, so a hand-written foo-c beside (declare-c foo ...) came out
as the checker complaining that a name not in the file was declared twice.
Refused now where it happens, naming both and saying to rename one.
84 hand-written C wrappers is the shape of a job the compiler should be
doing. The reason the shim exists is unchanged and is not negotiable: a
small aggregate's calling convention is a per-target classification, not
part of its layout, and reproducing x86-64, arm64 and wasm32 inside
emit.ml is three classifiers to keep correct forever, where a mistake
reads as a field full of garbage rather than as a link error. clang does
it, per target, for free. So the C stays; the typing of it stops.
declare-c names the library's own function in the library's own
signature, and Shim emits the typedefs, the extern prototype, the
flattening wrapper and the flattened declaration the Flan side calls.
It is a second form rather than a change to declare because no
structural rule can separate them: (declare start-raw [path string] i32
"flan_agent_start") means the symbol takes ptr+len, and (declare-c
init-window [w i32 h i32 title string] "InitWindow") means it takes a
NUL-terminated char *. Same shape, opposite claims. declare is
untouched, so sqrtf and vendor/agent keep working unedited.
The generated C rides on Tast.program rather than beside it, so the CLI,
the REPL and the acceptance table all carry it without being told about
it. `flan shim` prints it, because a wrong binding is wrong in a wrapper
that is otherwise on no disk anywhere.
Clojure's backtick, tilde and tilde-at rather than Common Lisp's comma forms:
is_delimiter already treats a comma as whitespace and every binding vector in
the corpus assumes it, so freeing the comma would rewrite more of the language
than macros are worth. They read as (quasiquote x), (unquote x) and
(unquote-splicing x), the way 'x already reads as (quote x) - the reader stays
dumb and the meaning is resolved later.
The backtick previously read as an ordinary symbol character, which is exactly
the failure the reader's own header warns about for the apostrophe. Both sigils
are delimiters now, so a~b is two things and can never be one name.
defmacro validates its shape before refusing, because a malformed one and a
well-formed one are different mistakes and deserve different sentences. The
three new reader names are refused by name too, or they would fall through to
Call and come back as unknown name quasiquote. unquote outside a quasiquote is
refused as a mistake rather than as a milestone, since the reader cannot know
where it is.
Nothing is stored: no Ast.Defmacro and no macro table. A new decl variant would
have forced edits to four files other agents hold this session, and a
process-global registry spanning the prelude parse, the package parses and
hundreds of test snippets would make results order-dependent. The storage shape
is the expander author's first decision anyway.
The design note records what the expander needs, and the blocker worth knowing:
a macro is [Form] -> Form, so Form has to be a Flan union whose layout the
compiler and the loaded macro agree on exactly, and union values are milestone
6.
Found by a read-only audit of emit.ml's failwith sites, each of which is a claim
that the checker guarantees something. Three of those claims were false, and
every one failed in the shape NEXT.md calls the worst available: type checks,
then dies with no source location.
An enum comparison is lowered now rather than refused. Types.is_comparable
already admits an enum, so the checker was stating an intent the backend never
honoured - (= k :a) is the first thing anyone writes with an enum, and it raised
Failure("comparison on K"). An enum is an i32 at run time, so all six
operators are an icmp. Signed, because (defenum K [a -1]) is accepted and an
unsigned compare would call -1 the largest member.
A union in a type position is refused instead. Constructing a union value and
reading a field of one were already refused, so nothing could ever be done with
such a value - only the declaration got through, and it reached clang as a
reference to an undefined %"U", which is a link error naming an emitted symbol
with the source location long gone.
A function type annotation is refused too. The function *value* was refused
where it is written; the annotation was refused nowhere, so (defn f [g (Fn []
i32)]) died with "no layout for". It now sits beside the Map line directly
above it, which is the same shape of not-yet.
The audit also found the sentence that covered the last two: NEXT.md and
check.ml's header both claim unions and function values are rejected by name.
That is true of values and false of types, which is exactly the gap the two
findings lived in.
(defmacro m [x] x) answered "unknown top-level form (defmacro ...)" —
refused, but not by name and with no reason, because the refusal list
only covered expressions. Now it checks the shape and then refuses,
which are two different mistakes and get two different reasons: a
defmacro with no body is a typo, a defmacro with a body is a feature
that is not here.
The reader's new sigils made this urgent rather than tidy. quasiquote,
unquote and unquote-splicing are now real heads arriving at the parser,
and without a case each they would fall through to Call and come back
from the checker as "unknown name quasiquote" — which tells you nothing
about what is missing. unquote and unquote-splicing are refused as
mistakes rather than as milestones: they mean nothing outside a
quasiquote and the reader cannot notice, because it does not track
where it is.
gensym is neither a reader token nor a special form — it is a function a
macro body calls while the macro runs, and there is nowhere for it to
run. Refused by name so it does not arrive as an unknown one.
package_of matched the file being edited against a package's directory, which
is right for every package that is one — and answers "not a package" for one
that is a single file, because the file's directory is not the file. A form
typed into sand.flan with the headless driver running would have spliced as a
bare step, the evaluation would have said ok, and the program would have gone
on calling the step it already had. That is the exact silent failure the
function exists to prevent, so it now matches the file too.
`(a b) came back as the unknown name "`" — precisely the failure the
reader's own header warns about for the apostrophe, one sigil over and
still open. Same fix: the sigil reads as a wrapper and the reader stays
dumb about what it means.
Clojure's ` ~ ~@ rather than Common Lisp's ` , ,@ because a comma is
already whitespace here, and every binding vector in the corpus is
written assuming that. Changing is_delim to free up the comma would
rewrite more of the language than macros are worth.
Backtick and tilde join is_delimiter so that a~b is two things and can
never be one name. No symbol in the corpus contains either character, so
closing the class costs nothing now and would cost a migration later.
NEXT.md described a packaging system with no visibility, no nesting and a link
that ignored the program, and explained sand's two files by it. All four are
now wrong. The Packages section says what the rules are; a new section says how
the link is decided and why the pruning has to take the functions as well as
the flags; and the sand section keeps the part that still stands — the headless
test needs no window on any target, which is a reason for two entry points and
never was a reason for two files.
The comments in load.ml and session.ml that used sim.flan to explain package
qualification now use vendor/agent, which is the package left with a defn in
it.
Three limitations, and the same program wanted all three gone.
An imported package's own imports were refused by name. They are resolved now,
and the qualification flattens to the inner alias: raylib imported by a package
that is itself imported is still rl/..., never sand/rl/.... That is forced, not
chosen — a directory reached along two routes has to arrive under one set of
names or the checker sees every declaration twice — and it is what lets the
dedupe work. A directory is keyed by its real path and read once, which also
ends a cycle: a package that imports itself meets its own entry and contributes
nothing the second time, and since the namespace is flat, mutually dependent
packages simply work. The same directory under two different aliases is
refused, because both cannot be true at once.
main is not exported. A package carrying one would collide with the importer's
the moment anything imported it, so a program could never be a package; and
main is a root, so an imported one keeps everything it calls reachable — for a
raylib front-end, the whole library, on the target that cannot link it. Writing
sand/main is refused at the line that wrote it rather than left to the checker,
which would only say the name is unknown. That is true and useless: the name is
missing on purpose and the message should say which purpose. A package that
calls its own main is refused too — it would silently get the importer's.
And a package may be a single .flan file named outright. sand.flan shares the
repository root with three other loose programs, so naming its directory would
import all four; moving it into a directory of its own would be arranging the
tree around a limitation. A file carries no .c and no link file — those belong
to a directory, and a package that needs them has one.
A package handed over its .c files and its `link` arguments the moment it was
imported, whatever the importing program did with it. That is what made sand's
two halves two files: anything naming vendor:raylib linked libraylib on every
target, and on wasm32 that link cannot succeed, so the headless run could not
so much as mention the package the interactive one needs.
Reach.link answers it from the checked program instead. Start at main and at
the globals that run before it, follow every call — including the Handled
frames, where a lifted handler clause is reached by address and by nothing
else — and keep what is reached. A package none of whose externs survive
contributes no C and no linker argument.
Dropping the flags alone would only move the failure: the bodies that called
into raylib would still be emitted, and wasm-ld would fail on the symbols
rather than on the argument. So the same walk prunes the functions and externs
too. Only those — globals, structs and unions stay, because an unreferenced
global is bytes in BSS and a dropped one is a silently different program.
Dev builds keep everything. What a REPL may redefine next is not a function of
what has been called so far.
The wasi-sdk candidate had an LLVM version in it, which moves release to
release — so the path advertised as the proper article would have matched only
by coincidence, while the emscripten one beside it was derived. Both are
derived now.
calc-me on wasm32 covers what the other three cases cannot: flan_argv hands
Flan an array of flan_slice built in C, so what it pins is the element stride
of a ptr+len pair — 16 bytes native, 12 on wasm32 — rather than a field
offset. It is also the claim in this file's own header, that the table runs on
the second target, honoured for the first time.
flan emit refuses --target rather than stripping it. The IR really is
target-free, so ignoring it is correct and silence about it is not.
