render.ml's output and emacs/flan-inspect.el's parser are the two ends of one
wire format, which is why the printer was left on the colon when the rest of
the corpus moved: shifting it alone would have broken inspection in the dev
loop without breaking a test that said so. They move together here.
The field list in the inspector is labelled with the dot too, which is the
spelling flan-inspect-step-expr already used to build `(.x b)' — the label and
the expression it stands for now read the same.
One case needed a guard the colon never did: `...' also begins with a dot and
is the renderer saying it stopped, not a field called `..'. A field name never
starts with a second dot, so one character of lookahead separates them.
The colon is not gone from the rendered grammar. An enum member is `:green' and
is a *value*, so the two are now told apart by the character alone, which is
the only thing that distinguishes them.
Also font lock, handed over with the same change: `:name' was the rule that
drew field labels, and with the colon belonging to keywords every label in the
corpus was left unfontified. `.name' is drawn as a constant, in both the places
it appears — the label in `{.x 1.0}' and the accessor in `(.x v)', which are
the same name.
render.ml's output is parsed by emacs/flan-inspect.el, which hard-codes
the colon when it reads a field out of a rendered struct. Moving the
printer on its own would break inspection in the dev loop without
breaking a test that says so, so the printer waits and moves with its
reader, in the Emacs lane.
The sweep could not tell a rendered *expectation* from a Flan *source*
snippet -- both are strings in a test -- so it converted both. The suite
named every one it got wrong, and those are back.
emacs/test-flan-dev.el:415 is the one edit inside emacs/: Flan source sent
to the daemon for eval, which the parser now refuses in the old spelling.
One label, in a fixture.
The delimiter is what disambiguates: (.x v) is a call and therefore an
access, {.x 1.0} is a brace form and therefore a construction. The colon
kept two jobs -- field label and enum member -- and this leaves it with
one, keys, which is what a map literal will want.
The old spelling is refused rather than quietly accepted, and the refusal
names the new one. Two accepted spellings is how two spellings become
permanent, and this repo rejects what it does not support and says why.
:keys keeps its colon. It names no field -- it is an instruction to the
compiler that happens to sit in the same brace -- so leaving it alone is
what lets the dot mean exactly one thing.
render.ml prints the dot too, or a struct the daemon shows would not be
Flan anyone could paste back.
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.
spec-memory.md defines an allocator as a procedure plus an opaque data
pointer, which reads as a function value, which check.ml refuses four ways.
None of the four is anywhere near this: `Allocator` is a `Types.t` case with
no user-writable constructor, the way `string` is a builtin ptr+len, its
procedure is a C symbol the emitter names, and every operation is an ordinary
named call that `check_call` already routes through `named_call`. The one
thing that really does need milestone 5 is a *user-written* allocator — it
wants a defn's name in value position — and that is refused by name with that
reason rather than left to come back as an unknown function.
An `Allocator` value is a pointer to the runtime's struct and never a copy of
one. That is forced, not chosen: the capability set has to be readable from
wherever a container landed, and `free-all` bumps an epoch every container
made from the allocator has to observe. A copy would give each its own epoch
and the dev trap would never fire.
Two decisions the spec left to be made here, both announced in BUILT.md:
`free-all` is retain-capacity — offset = 0, the pages stay — and handing the
pages back is `arena-destroy`, a separate operation. Zig's reset takes a mode;
Odin's arena_free_all is already retain-capacity in effect. Taking the mode
would have grown the operation table the spec froze at four. The epoch is
bumped either way, because the pages being the same does not make a container
made before the reset valid.
`context/allocator` and `context/temp` are dynamic variables with save and
restore, not extra parameters. The spec calls the allocator part of the
calling convention; the literal reading touches every signature, the FFI shim,
the dev trampolines and the reload ABI for the same observable behaviour.
`with-allocator` is its own IR node rather than a let and two calls, because
the restore has to happen on the transfer path too. A body that errors leaves
through the landing pad, and a context allocator left pointing into a region
nobody outside the body has heard of would be wrong in the break loop, which
is exactly where something is about to allocate to render a condition. The
acceptance program asserts that path by taking a restart out of a body.
The backend grew one prim, `Rt of string`: a call into the runtime's C named
by symbol, with argument and result types read off the expression nodes. The
container runtime is type-erased and therefore *is* a list of C entry points,
so one arm covers all of them rather than one arm each.
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.
