Two bugs, both in lib/x86.ml, both reached by signalling a condition from
inside the value being assigned.
The backend has no register wide enough to hold a struct, so it built every
aggregate in its destination, element by element as they were computed. A
transfer out of the middle left the destination in the middle: a global of
four numbers read part old and part new, and so did a local, a struct field,
an array element, a place behind a pointer. A union case was worse than the
rest, since its destination is zeroed before the fields are written.
The second one only looks like the first. An aggregate result is written
through a hidden pointer the caller supplies, and the transfer exit zeroed
that result on its way out, on the correct reasoning that the caller never
reads it. At (set g (f)) the pointer is g, so it zeroed the caller's
variable. It zeroes scalars only now — and with the first half in place
nothing reaches it, so that one is defence in depth and FIX.org says so
rather than claiming a test it does not have.
Assignment builds into a frame temporary and copies, which is the shape
emit.ml always had. The copy is paid where it buys something: [settles] says
whether lowering an expression is bound to reach the end of it, and a
right-hand side that settles is still built in place. That includes a
conversion, except the one direction that is checked — a float narrowed to an
integer — because an array of this language's literals is written
[(u32 1) (u32 2)] and refusing every cast would have taxed the commonest
aggregate there is. A let pays only inside a loop, because a slot reached
once per frame is recorded as bound after the value lands.
half-write.flan is every destination crossed with every right-hand side, run
on both backends, with a scalar row so a regression in one is not read as the
other. dev-halfwrite.flan asks the break loop the half a running program
cannot ask itself: the local, which is invisible to the program and plain to
an editor reading the frame.
The def-edit paragraph in docs/BUILT.md described this as open and is now the
claim it was waiting for. FIX.org records the two lanes the review of this one
turned up and this one does not take: an aggregate built in place can read its
own destination, which is an aliasing question rather than a transfer one; and
the temporary is a frame buffer no root table names, which matters the day a
struct may hold a dyn field.
