The mechanical half, ahead of the parser change that needs it. tools/unit-return.py
fills the empty slot with () and rewrites Unit as () wherever a type is spelled --
(Fn [i32] Unit), (Map i32 Unit), a return type written out.
Deciding whether a defn already had a return type is the whole difficulty, and
the script does it the way parse.ml did: is_type_form is transcribed rather than
improved, because being identical to the parser it replaces is what makes the
sweep meaning-preserving. It is re-runnable, so the lanes that branched before
this can have the same pass at merge:
python3 tools/unit-return.py .
python3 tools/unit-return.py --in-strings test/test_flan.ml test/test_acceptance.ml \
test/test_session.ml emacs/test-flan-dev.el emacs/test-flan-mode.el
python3 tools/unit-return.py --raw-ml lib/prelude.ml
python3 tools/unit-return.py --in-html web/index.html
-v logs every defn it saw and what it decided, which is how a sweep of 440 sites
gets reviewed at all. Embedded modes pool a file's type declarations across all
its fragments, because a snippet split across concatenation -- decls ^ "(defn f
[s [u8]] Cursor ...)" -- cannot see the names the other half declared; pooled
names count only in bare-symbol position, for the same reason the prelude's do.
A fragment that cuts off mid-form is skipped rather than guessed at. Five sites
in test_flan.ml still needed a hand, and they are in this commit.
Two things ride along because the sweep needs them: parse.ml reads a lone () as
the return type of a function with no body, which was not a shape the old
optional slot could produce; and the map refusals name () rather than Unit, since
that is now the spelling a caller wrote.
Three things stood between the flagship program and the web target, and each
is answered here rather than worked around.
The brush was a path. (rl/load-texture "brush.png") hands raylib a filename to
open, and a bare relative path means nothing on a target with no filesystem.
It is (embed "brush.png") now, decoded through a new binding —
LoadImageFromMemory, declared (Ptr u8) plus an explicit count because the shim
generator refuses a slice parameter and says so, with a Flan wrapper taking
the slice apart exactly as collision-point-poly? and load-font-ex already do.
One decode now serves both textures: the unflipped upload first, then
ImageFlipHorizontal in place, then the mirrored one. load-texture and
load-image lose their only call site in this repository; that is deliberate,
because a path-based load is the thing that cannot work here.
A package's C may now be addressed to one target, the way a link line already
could. A .c file may carry a tag before its extension — flan_agent.web.c — and
on that target it is compiled and *replaces* the untagged file of the same
base name. Replacement rather than plain tagging, so that teaching a package
about a new target is additive: the file that was right on three targets is
not renamed to say so. Selection is in Build and not in Load, for the reason
select_lflags gives.
The dev agent on the web is a no-op, and the reasoning is written at length in
vendor/agent/flan_agent.web.c. Short version: the agent is a socket server and
a browser has no sockets, so the missing <sys/time.h> was the surface and not
the cause. Refusing vendor:agent on a web target was the other candidate and
is ruled out by arithmetic — Flan has no conditional compilation, sand.flan
calls agent/start unconditionally, Reach cannot prune a package something
reachable calls into, so a refusal means the program does not build for the
browser at all. This does not contradict the `barf` decision made earlier
today. `barf` is asked to make something durable, and a no-op returns success
to a program that now believes bytes are on disk. The agent is asked to accept
redefinitions, and on the web there is no editor, no socket and no session —
--dev is refused by name on every wasm target — so there is nothing to lose.
sand.flan already says the same of a native release build at the call site.
test/test_web.ml builds sand.flan for the browser and reads the module for
brush.png's own bytes, whole. Not "IHDR": stb_image carries that string itself,
linked in from raylib, so it would pass on a build where the embed emitted
nothing. It is not run — node has no DOM, so main reaches InitWindow and dies
inside glfwInit on `window is not defined`, which says the module is live and
nothing about whether the canvas paints.
test/dune gains brush.png, because an embed is read by the checker and the
headless case reaches sand.flan through ../../ from a sandboxed _build.
test_session's C-c C-k case now passes ~origin, which is what both editor
paths already send; omitting it was testing a request nobody makes.
dune test is green. Docs follow in the next commit.
The mutation pass turned up one defect that did not make the suite go
red: a reader branch that forgets to advance reads the same character
for ever, and dune test waits as long as it is left to. In CI that is a
job killed by the runner with nothing named and no output to read.
watchdog.ml puts an alarm on every test binary — generous, because an
alarm that fires on a slow machine is a flake — and a five-second one
around each read in test_flan, where the budget really is small. The
first read that does not return wedges the rest, so a looping reader
costs five seconds and names the row instead of costing eight minutes
or never finishing. Both were watched: the string-escape loop now fails
in five seconds with the case named, and the per-binary backstop was
armed short and observed to fire.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The simulation was in a package of its own for one reason: importing raylib
linked libraylib on every target, so the headless run could not name the
package the interactive one needs. That reason is gone, and the split was
never anything else — the physics is the same code either way.
So sim.flan is back inside sand.flan, and test/programs/sand-headless.flan
imports sand.flan itself: window, raylib bindings, dev agent and all. It builds
for wasm32 anyway. Nothing it calls reaches raylib, so no shim is compiled, no
-lraylib is passed, and the front-end's functions are never emitted; sand.flan's
main is not exported, so the only main is the headless one. The hash is
unchanged on both targets at both optimisation levels, which is the point —
a refactor that moved the number would have moved the simulation.
The new cases cover what made it possible rather than only the result: a
package nothing calls into, native and wasm32; raylib reached both directly and
through sand.flan and read once; and the three refusals — sand/main, one
directory under two aliases, and two mains.
test_session's package-qualification case moves to vendor/agent, which is now
the package in the tree with a defn in it.
C-x C-e is the case that repeats - you evaluate expressions constantly and
redefine functions occasionally - and it is also the one case where unloading
is safe. The thunk is called directly by flan_reload_call rather than through a
cell, and it takes no registry slot, so once it has returned nothing points
into its text and the value it produced has been copied out. The module says so
with flan_reload_transient and the agent dlcloses it.
Skipping the registry matters for more than tidiness: the table holds 4096
names and an expression evaluated in a loop would have exhausted it.
A module that publishes a body can never make this claim, since leaving a
pointer behind is its whole purpose. Measured on a running program: sixteen
expression evaluations retain zero mappings, each redefinition retains three,
permanently and correctly.
Refusing every defconst was right about the class and wrong about most of the
instances. A constant the checker consumed - (defconst rows (/ h c)), which
decides grid's type before anything else resolves - is in the shape of the
program and no store can reach it. A constant that is only ever read at run
time is just bytes in memory. sand's colors is the second kind, and tuning a
colour table live is exactly the thing you would want a dev loop for.
So a dev build emits every defconst as a mutable global rather than a constant.
LLVM can then no longer fold a read of it and a module can store into it, and a
changed one is published at the frame boundary the same way a new function body
is. Release builds emit constant and get all the folding back.
Tast.global.gfolded records which kind it is, because nothing downstream of the
checker can tell: env.consts holds exactly the constants the folding pass
consumed, and membership is the question "is this value in the program's
shape?". The session keys its refusal on that, with a message that says what
the constant is used for rather than just that it changed.
Verified against a running sand: sim/colors is accepted, sim/rows is refused
and says why.
C-c C-c on settle inside sand-sim/sim.flan declared settle, but the running
program only ever knew it as sim/settle. The form spliced as a brand-new
unrelated name, the evaluation answered ok, and nothing changed. Sand's
simulation lives in a package, so the one thing worth tuning live was the one
thing that silently did nothing - and reported success while doing it.
Load now records what alias each package directory was imported under and what
names it owns, because a file on disk does not say what it is called from
outside; the importer chooses that. A session looks the editing file's
directory up in that table and qualifies the incoming forms through Load's own
qualify_decl, so a redefined settle lands on sim/settle and its call to
move-grain lands on sim/move-grain, by the same rule the import used. A name
the package does not own - the prelude's - is left alone.
Derived from the path rather than sent by the editor, which is where this
departs from CIDER's ns key: a Clojure namespace is declared in the file, but a
Flan alias is not written anywhere the editor can see it. One directory
imported under two aliases is refused with the reason instead of resolved to
either.
Asked whether a defconst could be redefined, probed it, and got ":status ok"
for a change that did nothing at all - the module was built, delivered,
installed, and the program went on using the old value. That is the
silent-wrongness class the house rule exists to prevent, so it is now four
refusals and a fix.
A defconst's value is folded into its call sites - into an array length at
worst, which is decided before any type resolves - so it lives in the running
program's code and not only in its storage. Refused. A defenum member is the
same thing: :space is erased to an i32 literal in the caller. Refused, and
compared over declarations rather than over Tast.program, which carries no
enums at all for exactly that reason.
A defvar's initial value is deliberately not refused. Its storage holds live
state the program moved past long ago, and refusing to change the initialiser
would be refusing "edit the code, keep the sand". Same Tast.global record as a
defconst, opposite answers, told apart by gconst.
The value comparison is structural and conservative - anything it does not
recognise counts as changed. Comparing emitted text would be wrong, since
Emit.const on a string allocates a name off a per-module counter and two
different strings in two throwaway modules both come out as @".str.0".
Third: a new global's declared initial value was being dropped. flan_dev_global
callocs, so (defvar n i64 42) added at run time was silently zero. It now takes
the initial value as a blob, copies it on the allocation and ignores it
afterwards - the second half being where "a reload must not reset the program's
state" lives. In the allocation path rather than a branch at the call site, so
it cannot be got wrong at one of them.
Fourth: a change with no body to publish and no storage to allocate now answers
"nothing to install" instead of shipping an empty module. That is what the
defconst probe actually did, and it cost the program a frame's worth of reload
it did not need.
lib/session.ml holds the declarations a running process was built from plus
every change accepted since, which is what an editor needs and what a one-shot
compiler cannot have.
Transactionality came for free. Check.program builds a fresh environment from a
declaration list on every call, so a form that fails to check mutates nothing
and the accumulated list is simply not replaced - no scratch-environment
machinery, which is what I was about to build. Re-checking the whole program
each evaluation costs the frontend, under 10ms, less than the llc after it.
There is a test for the case that matters: a typo, then a good form, in the
same session.
Which names the process was built with comes from the checked program, not from
any accumulated AST, because Check.program prepends the prelude and no AST
contains it. Derive it from declarations and print-line reads as new, gets a
registry cell nobody publishes, and the first call jumps to null.
Three changes are refused with a reason rather than loaded. A function's
signature, because a cell is a bare ptr and every call site compiled before the
change still passes the old arguments through it. A global's type, because the
storage exists and has a shape - reusing it reads at the wrong offsets, and
replacing it discards the state the reload exists to preserve. A struct's
fields, because the values the process is holding have the old layout. Note
what the checker already catches on its own: change a parameter type and the
caller fails to type check first, loudly. These rules only get a turn on a
change the checker accepts, which is a name nothing else in the program uses -
exactly where the silent version lives. Hence an unused defvar and a C-called
defn in the fixtures.
The accumulated list is the post-Load one, so an evaluated import is spliced as
its expansion. Otherwise re-evaluating a file that imports something appends a
second import, Load expands it again, and the duplicate-name pass rejects it.
C-c C-k on sand.flan's own text is the test.
flan reload now takes a program and a file of changed forms rather than a list
of function names and a --new list: the session works out which names are new,
which is the thing a bare CLI could not.
Also fixed, found by running the agent test under load: the agent took SIGPIPE
when a sender read part of a reply and closed. Replies go out with
MSG_NOSIGNAL, per call rather than by installing a handler, because the signal
disposition belongs to the program the agent is embedded in.
