FnAddr (Fnval n) emitted the symbol, which is right for a whole-program build
and wrong the instant anything is redefined into it. It now reads the cell,
and so does every direct call, which is what emit.ml's body_of does and is the
half that matters: a redefinition is one store, and it has to reach call sites
that already exist.
What is emitted, all of it behind dev:
- one cell per function in .data, .globl, initialised to the body this build
compiled. Spelled exactly as Emit.cellname spells it, because the point of
having one here is that an LLVM-built module binds
@"flan.cell.<n>" = external global ptr against it. nm -D over the two
builds of the same program gives identical sets of 68 cell symbols.
- the cell load placed after the arguments, which emit.ml has as a
load-bearing comment: a redefinition landing between two calls must not
land in the middle of one. CallPtr stays the other way round.
- the flan_dev_reg_enable constructor, which arms the allocation registry.
Not emitted: Emit.cellptr, the deeper spelling for a name the host was never
built with. It cannot arise in a whole-program build and belongs with the
redefinition module that would introduce one.
The --x86 --dev refusal is relaxed, and the argument is that flan dev never
reaches this fork: --x86 is read only by flan build, and the daemon builds
host and modules through Build.executable / Build.shared without it. So the
flag means a host whose call sites are redefinable, and nothing claims the
module that would redefine through them exists.
Two things were needed to believe any of that. First, the corpus with --dev on
both sides: 97 MATCH, 0 DIFFER, same as without it. Before the constructor was
added that read 96/1 — registry.flan asks (live? ...) and got four zeroes,
which is the whole of what a dev host does differently besides the cells.
Second, and the corpus cannot do this one: a dev build starts with every cell
pointing at the body this build compiled, so it prints what a release build
prints whether anything reads the cell or not. spike/x86/cells.sh preloads a
shared object whose constructor dlsyms flan.cell.twice and stores a different
body there -- the one store a redefinition ends in, done from outside, no
compiler involved. Both dev builds then print the new answer for a direct call
and for a function value, and both release builds are unchanged, which is what
says the change came from the indirection and not from symbol interposition.
One thing the later lane inherits, now written in both headers rather than
left to be discovered. x86.ml licenses its own calling convention on the
grounds that a dev build is compiled entirely here and a release build
entirely by LLVM, so the two never meet in one process. A cell an LLVM-built
module can store into is the first thing that could make that false: the
conventions agree on scalars and disagree on every aggregate, so an
Emit.redefinition module dlopened into an --x86 host would be right until the
first redefined function took or returned a struct. The answer is a
redefinition emitter here, not a classifier.
Item 17 left this as a loose end: flan_vec_as_slice returns a slice by value
and should hit the "aggregate return" refusal, bounds-condition.flan exercises
it in and out of bounds and matches, and nobody traced why.
It is the first of the two possibilities that report named — the refusal is
narrower than it reads, and nothing is going right by accident.
flan_vec_as_slice's Flan-level return type is Unit. check.ml builds it as
[rt loc Types.Unit "flan_vec_as_slice"] and flan_rt.c writes the two words
through a [void *out] parameter, so [is_void rty] answers first and the
[is_agg rty] test below it is never reached.
That is not one symbol's accident, it is the convention. Every aggregate-valued
runtime result crosses through an out-pointer the checker allocates; every
other [rt] builder in check.ml answers Unit, an Int, a Ptr, an Alloc or a
Handle. And the other user of this path, a [declare]d C function, is covered by
[crossable], which admits String and Slice only as a parameter and refuses an
aggregate return outright.
So there is no sret convention to build for Rt, and building one would be worse
than the refusal: the C boundary wants SysV classification — a 16-byte slice
comes back in rax:rdx — and not the hidden-pointer convention this backend uses
internally. There is no classifier in the file and nothing to test one against.
The line stays as a guard against those two rules changing, and now says which
rules and what the work would actually be.
With it goes the rest of item 16's claim that the container runtime is
unexercised. It is: Vec and Map through vec.flan, vec-of-vec.flan, maps.flan
and map-iter.flan, and Pool through registry.flan, handles.flan,
generics.flan and pool-stale-region.flan. All match.
Another lane landed (slice-from-ptr p n) while this backend was not looking,
and it arrived as two refusals rather than one: slice-from-ptr.flan and
bounds.flan both stopped building through --x86. Neither is a new obstacle —
a Slice _ is {ptr, i64} here exactly as it is in emit.ml, so the form is one
store of the pointer and one of the length and no new representation at all.
The half worth writing down is the check. There is nothing to compare the
length against — only the caller knows how many elements live behind that
pointer — so what is checked is that the promise is not absurd, and that test
is *signed*. check_slice's own compares are unsigned, and a negative i32
sign-extended to 64 bits is a huge unsigned value that an unsigned "hi <= len"
waves through; the result would be a slice about 2^64 long that reads as a
pass and faults somewhere else entirely.
Nothing in the corpus walks that path: every length in slice-from-ptr.flan is
a literal, and a negative literal is refused by check.ml before any code is
emitted. So spike/x86/p7-slice-from-ptr.flan takes the length as a parameter
and runs it through a restart-case, which puts the condition's low/high/length
on stdout and compares them against the LLVM build.
The daemon caught Loc.Error at each op and nothing else. That was survivable
while the frontend was the only thing that could refuse a form; it is not now
that expansion is part of evaluating. Both C-c C-c and C-x C-e run a clang
driver through Build.macro_module, which answers with an exit status and a
Failure, and a dlopen that finds no symbol answers with another one. Neither
is a Loc.Error, so neither was answered, and an exception past serve is not a
refused evaluation — it is a dead daemon with the program still on screen and
a closed socket waiting for the editor's next request.
The boundary is now one place, around the whole of a request, rather than a
new arm at each of the dozens of calls. Out_of_memory, Stack_overflow and
Sys.Break go through it: those say the process cannot continue, and answering
"error" to them would claim a session survived something it did not.
Everything else is about the form that was sent, and the message it carries
is the one the user can act on, so a clang exit status reaches :message
instead of being flattened to "internal error".
The session's own state goes with it. Session.eval wrote the imported macro
set above the checker, so a form that did not check left the session holding
a package's macros and none of its declarations; it is held and committed at
the bottom with decls, program and env. Session.eval_expr committed the
generic copies it had instantiated before emitting the module that carries
them, which is the session believing it holds a body nothing was written for;
that assignment moved below Emit.
Both are pinned. test_session drives the two rollbacks in process, and
test_dev drives a real daemon whose macro module cannot be built — the
expression path and the redefinition path, each followed by the same
evaluation succeeding and by the session still knowing the program.
The transfer exit returned whatever the return temporary held where
emit.ml returns zero. Meaningless to a caller -- its guard sees the
channel set and never looks -- but main is a caller with no guard, and
what it finds in rax is the process exit status.
The survey compares stderr as well now, which is where every message
the new machinery produces goes: the bounds and slice errors, the
three restart refusals, the transfer failure. Each carries a location
this backend emits by hand as a .rodata label and a length in a
register, and an exit status of 134 with the wrong text beside it is
exactly the failure that reads as a match. It also walks spike/x86's
own probes.
p6-transfer.flan is the two re-propagation branches the corpus does
not reach. Every transfer in restarts.flan stops at a restart-case
inside the handler-bind's extent, so the handler frames never come off
on the transfer path; and in nested and shadowed the inner frame
offers the name, so a restart-case the transfer is not aimed at never
has to put the target back. allocators.flan already covers the third.
89 MATCH 0 DIFFER 0 refused, over test/programs and spike/x86,
comparing stdout, stderr and the exit status.
DISCUSS.md item 17 is the report.
The transfer channel was the only thing between 41 programs and the
corpus. It is there now: a guard after every Flan call, a landing pad
per restart-case, handler-bind and with-allocator, a transfer exit per
function that runs its fdefers, and check_at and check_slice, which
could not exist until the guard did.
Measured by what the programs print and what they exit with, never by
reading bytes. spike/x86/survey.sh builds every program in
test/programs both ways and diffs stdout and the exit status; it did
not exist, so it is here too, and it is the progress meter.
before 41 MATCH 1 DIFFER 41 refused by name
after 83 MATCH 0 DIFFER 0 refused by name
The one DIFFER was bounds.flan, and it was the honest answer to
"--x86 is silently a --no-bounds-checks build". It is not one any
more: check_at and check_slice signal through the channel exactly as
emit.ml's do, so a bounds violation signals, a restart-case catches
it, and an unhandled one exits 134 on both backends. The transitional
refusal that would have said so retired before it was written.
check_no_transfer is not removed, it is narrowed to the one place the
argument still holds: a global's initialiser runs from
flan..init-globals, before main and before anything can handle
anything, so a transfer out of it has nowhere to go.
Four bugs, and three of them are the shape item 16 predicted -- code
that reads correctly and answers wrong, found by output and not by
objdump:
- The body fell through into the transfer exit, so every fdefer ran
twice on a normal return. emit.ml cannot have this bug: its ret
terminates the block.
- A Vec crossed to the runtime as the address of a *copy*, so pushes
grew the copy and an in-bounds (at v 1) signalled against a length
of zero.
- ucomis sets CF, ZF and PF together for a NaN, so sete answered true
for (= x x) and the prelude's NaN test never fired: (/ 0.0 0.0)
formatted as -9223372036854775808. Flan's comparisons are LLVM's
ordered ones, so < and <= swap and =, != take a setnp beside them.
- A union read field 0 through the struct table and was refused by
name rather than laid out as a tag and a payload.
And one that could not have been found later: emit_globals_init stored
a null *into* the channel slot rather than a cell address into it,
which is a null pointer for every callee to write through. Harmless
while nothing could transfer; a fault the first time a guard loaded
through it.
C-u C-x C-e was never tried on a macro call. Ast.pause_call takes the
expanded loc, which Loc.from_macro has stamped -- it sets a name and
leaves file, line and column the call site's, so the frame the break
loop reports is the line the reader is looking at. Asserted rather than
argued.
Also: the ring rule stated generally (refused at the parse of whichever
file first has both members in scope, always before a session exists),
and the declaration refusal's sentence made build-neutral, since the arm
fires in an ordinary file parse too.
Parse.expr never ran the expander, so a macro call typed as a bare
expression was an unknown name -- a package's and the prelude's alike,
which is what said the gap was older than importable macros. It is the
wrap Parse.decl already had, applied to the other entry point, with
Parse.with_imported in front of it in Session.eval_expr because the one
expression an editor sends carries no import.
The decision that was waiting: an expression that expands to a
declaration is refused by name, in the head dispatch rather than in a
walk over what the expander answered, so a nested one and a hand-typed
one get the same sentence. A quasiquoted declaration is still a value.
The spin refusal fires on this path; the ring cannot reach it, because a
ring is refused while its own package is parsed. Expansion happens
before the thunk is built, so the 5s three-way wait is untouched.
`indexed` took an Array or a Slice, so a `(Ptr T)` that came back
from C was readable at element 0 through `deref` and nowhere else.
The length is not missing from the world — for `font.recs` it is in
the struct, one field over — it was missing from the language.
`(slice-from-ptr p n)` is the form that says it. No marker on the
name: `!` here means mutates and `?` means asks, and `zeroed`, the
nearest neighbour, carries neither; `ptr` is the marker, because a
`(Ptr T)` only ever arrives from a `declare-c`.
Nothing new in the representation. A slice is already {ptr, i64} in
both backends, so this is two insertvalues; `x86.ml` takes the new
constructor on its existing `unsupported` arm.
It refuses a first argument that is not a pointer, a negative literal
length at check time, and a negative computed one at run time — that
last through `signal_block` and `@flan_slice_error`, reused rather
than growing the runtime a function, and *signed*, because
`check_slice` compares unsigned and a negative i32 sign-extends to a
huge u64 that walks through it. Behind `f.md.checks` like the other
two: on at -O0 and -O2, off only when checks were asked off.
It owns nothing and needed no analysis to say so — a slice is not
move-only and carries no allocator, so `free` refuses it by the rule
that already refuses `(as-slice v)`.
`rl/font-recs` and `rl/font-glyphs` are where the promise is written,
beside raylib's own invariant rather than at every call site, and
they are the shape a count-naming binding directive could never have
covered. `examples/text-rectangle-bounds.flan` is the port that
motivated this and it runs; `test/programs/slice-from-ptr.flan`
covers the form with no raylib and no window.
Both unions kept the wrong side. macro_union keeps the left on a name
collision, and both callers had the older set on the left: Load.program
put the ambient set ahead of the packages it had just resolved, and
Session put the copy it had been holding since creation ahead of what
Load handed back. So editing a macro in a package and reloading the file
that imports it went on expanding the old body -- and said nothing,
which in this area is the failure that costs the most to find.
Two tests, because the two unions are reached by different paths: the
reload itself, and the C-c C-c after it, which reads the set the session
kept rather than the one Load just supplied. Each fails on its own if
only the other order is put back.
Also written down, and not fixed: C-x C-e expands no macros at all.
Parse.expr never calls the expander, so (unless ...) as a bare
expression is as much an unknown name as (mac/twice 4) -- the prelude
fails there too, which is what says it is an older gap. Changing it
changes what an expression evaluation means.
And the cost note is cut back to what was measured. Four macro modules
where the file's own macros leave two is what the cache shows; why four
is not settled and no longer claimed.
The feature was built and never tested. Three things were missing.
The two packages holding a ring of macros and a macro that never settles
were not dependencies of the test stanza, so both non-termination
refusals failed on "no package at ..." rather than on their own reason.
They fire, and now the suite sees them fire.
The positive half of the rule had no acceptance case at all -- only the
refusal that pins the bare name. pkg-macro.flan is asserted at three opt
levels and on the dev path, which is where six package macros and the
program's own coexist in one file.
And the dev loop was broken in exactly the way that matters most here.
Session held the imported macro set but *replaced* it on every
evaluation, and the one form C-c C-c sends carries no import -- so
(mac/twice 4) compiled on the build and came back "unknown function" on
the first reload. It unions now. test_session drives two evaluations,
because one proves nothing: the first could have re-supplied the set.
BUILT.md said the expander collects from the prelude and the file being
compiled. It collects from imported packages too, and the refusal's old
reasoning -- that this needed a second import resolver -- was wrong for a
reason worth keeping written down.
Cold build cost roughly doubles for a program importing a package that
declares macros: a macro module is built per round and the package's
rounds are its own. Warm is unchanged at ~70ms.
Load.program takes forms: it reads the import forms, resolves them with the
one resolver it always had, and parses the file with the packages' macros in
front of it. The refusal said this needed a second import resolver at the Form
level. It did not notice that the file being compiled is parsed before Load
runs too, so no shape of the feature could have left import resolution where
it was.
Names arrive qualified, as a defn's do. (mac/twice 4) is a call and (twice 4)
is an unknown name.
Stopped mid-task: dune test was never run and the acceptance wiring is
unfinished. HANDOFF-macros.md has what is left.
The allocation registry had a recording side and half a reader. This is the
rest of the reader: point at any heap address, a breakdown by type, what is
still held, and the test that stops dev-ptr.flan's header from being read by
hand.
The recorded name, back to a type. The table records a string and has to —
the note is built where the concrete type exists and what crosses into the
runtime is bytes. What closes it is that the string is Types.to_string, which
is the source spelling, so the round trip is the language's own reader,
Parse.texpr and Check.resolve. No table of spellings is written down, so
nothing can fall behind Types.to_string, and a name that is not a type —
"pool slots" — is refused with the name quoted rather than defaulted.
The address root renders a (Ptr T) and not the pointee, which puts it through
render.ml's pointer arm: permission is asked in one place in the compiler, and
an address root and a slot root reach the same two answers by the same code.
Flan has no integer-to-pointer cast, so flan_dev_reg_addr is an extern beside
flan_agent_frame_slot, for the same reason.
One walk and two questions: a leak report is a breakdown with the dead left
out, so flan_dev_reg_by_type is one function and the agent formats it.
"At exit" is not a hook. A program killed by a signal runs no handler, which
is how a game under the editor ends, so (:op "leaks") is the authoritative
reader and can be asked at any moment including the one before the kill. The
atexit hook is for the program that returns from main, is registered from
inside flan_dev_reg_enable rather than by a file-scope destructor so that a
release build does not grow a third not-free place, and is off unless
FLAN_DEV_LEAKS is set because the acceptance table reads stderr.
The memcheck half of item 6 is deliberately not here.
hashable? gated the type and not the operations: a generic could take and
return a (Map $t V) and could not get or put into one. The hash and the
equality are emitted as concrete symbols chosen from the key type, and
while $t is a variable there is no symbol to name.
The five arms that reach the pair - put, get, has-key?, reserve, clone -
now check their arguments and return a placeholder of the operation's own
type when the key is a type variable: Unit for put and reserve, None for
get so the (Option V) around it still checks, false for has-key?, a zeroed
map for clone. The node is thrown away with the rest of the abstract pass
and the real one is built in the copy, exactly as println's is.
What makes that different from print's free ride is the clause. A map
operation can fail at a concrete type; it is deferred anyway because
{:where (hashable? $t)} is in the signature, so the refusal lands at the
call that asked for the type, against a requirement the author wrote down.
A generic that declares nothing gets no deferral - deferred_key checks
first, and map_type has usually refused the signature already. So the rule
for the allow-list is not a headcount: either the operation cannot fail
after substituting, or a declared predicate gives its failure somewhere to
land. The comment at the print arm says that now instead of "stays two
long".
The instantiation-time refusal names the call site, the type it asked for,
the predicate and the clause, rather than repeating the generic's name
twice.
edn.flan crashed by jumping into .rodata, several statements after the
mistake, and the assembly at the jump read correctly. Item 15 said this
is how hand-encoding fails, and it is: the crash and the cause were in
different functions.
The cause is one line of design. A form whose value is thrown away was
handed the sink, and the sink was spelled as an address — rbp+0. That is
the saved rbp, and rbp+8 is the return address, so a non-void form in
statement position stored its value straight over both. A 16-byte slice
did it in one rep movsb.
The sink is now compared by identity and never used as an address:
anything with a value that is handed it gets a frame temporary instead,
reclaimed immediately. The point is not the temporary, it is that the
store has somewhere legal to go.
edn.flan matches the LLVM build now — 60 lines of a hand-written EDN
reader, unions, options, nested collections and all.
The sweep over test/programs named its own next two nodes. (at grid r c)
is one node with two indices and not two nodes — an array of arrays is
contiguous, so the second index walks into the element the first landed
on — and machine.flan is the program that says so.
Then unions: MakeCase, CaseField and Match. The payload offset comes from
lay_fields over the same two fields Emit.lay measures a union as, and a
case's field offsets from lay_fields over that case's own fields, so
there is still one layout calculator and this file is still a caller of
it. match reads the tag and compares, an Option reads an i8 at offset 0
and a declared union an i32, and everything past the tag and the binds is
shared — the arrangement emit.ml settled on, for the same reason.
An exhausted match falls through to ud2 rather than to whatever follows.
The checker proved it cannot happen; a defined SIGILL at the instruction
that fell through costs two bytes and is the cheap half of item 15's
question 4.
machine.flan, bytes2.flan, array-ctor.flan and destructure.flan all agree
with the LLVM build now.
The corpus sweep found it, and it found it the way item 15 said this work
fails: array-ctor.flan crashed, and the assembly around the crash read
correctly. (set (.x (at pts 0)) 1.5) went through lvalue, lvalue had no
case for At, and the fallback evaluates — so the store landed in a copy of
the element and the array kept its zeros.
emit.ml has this as addr's own At case. One line here, and the program
matches the LLVM build.
Two more programs beside the fizz: one for the internal calling
convention the fizz does not touch at all — a struct argument, a struct
return through the hidden pointer, f32 in the SSE half, eight integer
arguments so two go on the stack, and a slice by pointer — and one for
the rest of the core: a global with an initialiser, recursion, break,
continue, the bitwise family, unsigned shifts and the conversions both
ways. Both agree with LLVM.
al is now zero at every call this backend makes, including the three in
main that were reaching flan_rt_init, flan_argv and flan_exit without it.
Inert on a fixed callee; the point is that there is no exception to the
rule to remember.
A map keyed by a type variable cannot be put into inside a generic body:
the hash and the equality are concrete symbols chosen from the concrete
key type, and there is none until the copy exists. The refusal now says
that, and says what hashable? does buy - taking and returning a
(Map $t V) - rather than leaving the reader to infer it.
Closing the hole means adding the map operations to the list of forms
the abstract pass defers to instantiation. That list is print and
println and nothing else, and every member is a place where a refusal
moves from the definition to a call site, which is what the abstract
pass exists to prevent. Two is short enough to hold in your head.
Also written down: four of the prelude's copyable? declarations are
convention rather than checker-enforced. The move analysis tracks
locals, not reads out of a slice, so swap! and friends check without it
- and would still duplicate a header at [(Vec i32)].
The author's decision, and it removes the one syntax question generics
had. A return type can no longer be written in braces, so a {...} after
the signature is unambiguously the constraint map and there is no
structural rule to explain.
The reasons for the record: the brace's value meaning and its type
meaning do not correspond the way the bracket's do - [1 2 3] is a value
whose type is [3 i32], but {.x 1} is a value whose type is a name, and a
map value is built by map-new with no braces anywhere - and dropping it
reserves {} in type position for anonymous struct types.
Braces in a type are refused with the surviving spelling named rather
than falling through to "expected a type". Types.to_string and
Cimport's source printer both print (Map K V) now, and Shim refuses the
application spelling where it used to refuse only Ast.Tmap.
x86.ml was an encoder and a frame model with nothing calling it. It now
lowers a whole Tast.program to an assembly file, and `flan build --x86`
hands that file to the same clang invocation the LLVM path uses, against
the same runtime objects. The flag is off by default; LLVM stays the
release backend and the default one.
Three programs, built both ways and compared by what they print and what
they exit with rather than by reading bytes: exit 0; a dotimes that
prints; and a fizz over a call, an if, a remainder and two string
literals. All three agree with the LLVM build.
The measurement decided the target. hist.ml over the fizz program shows
no Signal, no Handled, no RestartCase — a loop that prints does not drag
conditions in. What does is the bounds check and the allocator, and
neither is in the reachable set of a program that prints a number.
That is why there is no transfer guard here, and check_no_transfer is
what makes the omission sound rather than hopeful: if nothing reachable
can write the channel, no call can return with it set. It is a
whole-program property, so it is checked once per build and the build
stops with the node's name when it fails.
(t x) is not a name is_cast knows - t is not a machine type - so it is
its own arm, admitted by numeric? because a cast produces a number.
vec-new, pool-new and map-new all reach the one list of what names a
type, so the spike's line for vec-new had already covered the other two;
zeroed takes its type from the position it is written in. All four are
pinned in programs/generics.flan.
swap!, reverse!, sort!, sort-by!, index-of, min-of, max-of, map!,
reduce and filter, each written once over $t. Every call site in the
corpus moves with them.
min-of and max-of are not min and max because min and max are builtins
over two or more numbers and nothing shadows a builtin. These reduce a
slice, which is a different operation at a different arity.
sort-bytes! did not collapse into sort!, and the reason is the point of
the predicates: a [u8] is not ordered? and cannot be, because < is an
instruction and comparing two slices lexicographically is a loop. It is
sort-by! with bytes<? written in, one line, keeping its name and its
stability note. sum-i32/sum-f32 and append-i64!/append-f64! stay for the
reasons the spike gave.
Not what the notes predicted: none of the ten collapses on a signature
change alone. filter and reduce need copyable? because the checker
demands it - reduce's accumulator at (Vec i32) is a double move - and
the rest declare it because a slice of owning elements would have them
duplicating headers.
A generic defn produces no Tast.fn, so the editor was told nothing had
been installed and nothing had gone wrong. eval now expands a redefined
generic name to its copies, and picks up any copy the running process
was never built with - which is how a redefined caller reaching a
generic at a new element type gets that copy built and loaded.
C-x C-e is the path that could really go stale, and did: it checks
against the live environment, so an expression naming a generic at an
unused type generated a copy that existed in no program and the thunk
called a symbol nothing defined. Marked and spliced.
There was no cache to invalidate. program_with_env builds a fresh env
every evaluation, so the instantiation cache cannot survive one; the
test pins that rather than inventing machinery for it.
A signature change reaches the session as a refusal about put!-i32, a
name the source does not contain. It now says which generic it is a
copy of, at which types, and that every copy changed together.
The spike proved the shape; this makes it the feature. A generic body is
still checked abstractly once, but now it may be told what to assume:
{:where (ordered? $t)} at the head of the body, Clojure's {:pre [...]}
spelling, with five predicates - ordered?, equal?, hashable?, numeric?
and copyable?.
The syntax catch settled structurally: {K V} is still a legal return
type, and a constraint map is told from one by its leading keyword. A
keyword is not a type anywhere in the language, so the slot after the
return type is unambiguous and {K V} did not have to go.
A type variable is move-only by default, with copyable? the opt-out.
Move is the stricter rule, so assuming it can only refuse a valid
program, never admit a bad one. That is Rust's T: Copy and not Odin's
anything - Odin has no move semantics at all.
The runaway refusal no longer names a depth. It names the chain: a
generic already on the instantiation stack, asked for again at a type
built around the one it had before, is growing and will not stop.
check_constants makes two kinds of finding and they were treated alike.
A value that does not match, or a C name the header does not have, is
the library contradicting the package and stops a build the way a
permuted defstruct does. An enum nobody mapped and a rule that reaches
nothing are about the package's own bindings file -- real, and worth
fixing, but telling a lane that added a defenum to go and edit a config
in a message shaped like "your layout is wrong" is the wrong thing to
fail a build with. Those gate generate-c, where that file is edited.
Also: a const prefix now counts as reaching a name before an explicit
constant line is consulted, so a rule whose every match is also spelled
out by hand is not reported as matching nothing.
Two gaps the raylib examples hit.
The layout check compared a Flan enum against the header's `int` and
called it a disagreement. It is not one: Shim.cty lowers a defenum to
int32_t in a struct field exactly as it does in a parameter, which is
what the signature check already knew and the layout check did not. One
predicate now serves both, symmetric, and tolerant of a 32-bit integer
and nothing else -- f64 against the library's float still fails, in the
very struct whose other field is an enum. Camera3D.projection is a
CameraProjection again and rl/camera-projection is gone with it, so
`.projection :perspective` resolves at the construction site.
And generate-c's claim said nothing about a defconst or a defenum
member, so a wrong flag bit was completely silent. `bindings` gained
`enum`, `const` and `constant` lines saying what a Flan constant is
called in C -- the prefix is nowhere in the Flan name, so it is declared
rather than guessed. Nothing goes quiet in either direction: a name the
rule builds and the header lacks is reported, a rule that reaches
nothing is reported, and a defenum with no line is itself a finding,
because otherwise the silence just moves up one level.
clang's dump gives anonymous EnumDecls for every raylib enum and no
value at all for an enumerator written without `= n`, so the constants
are one flat table and the values are counted the way C counts them.
cache_format bumped with the dump type.
Build.cachedir sat under TMPDIR, which dune makes private per run, so no
test run ever reused an object and every build in the suite was cold. It
moves to $XDG_CACHE_HOME/flan/objcache (FLAN_CACHE_DIR overrides), which
is safe because the keys are total: compile_c digests the source text,
the compiler's stamp and every flag; wasm_resource_dir digests the
builtins archive; compiler_object digests flan.cmxa and flan.a. Writes
were already .tmp-then-rename, so concurrent dune jobs are fine.
Macro.key was the one key that was not total -- prelude text plus the
call's forms, and nothing about the compiler whose codegen produced the
.so it names, which is dlopened straight back into this binary. Under a
per-run TMPDIR that never showed; under a durable cache it is a stale
expander that crashes rather than a compile error. It carries the
compiler's stamp now, handed across start_merged's exec in
FLAN_COMPILER_STAMP because a merged dev binary lives at a per-session
path and keying on that rebuilt a macro module every dev start.
Measured on dev-repl.flan, launch to bound socket: 2.0s cold against
0.48s warm. Whole-program flan build: 1.44s against 0.06s. Full dune
test 25.7s/30.1s before, 24.0s after, user CPU ~50s down to ~34s.
And the await: one timer covered two waits, a build then a bind, so
'the daemon never listened' was a wrong diagnosis of a build that had
not finished. listening now polls the process alongside the socket and
says which -- exited with a status, or still running and therefore still
building. A daemon that dies fails in milliseconds instead of costing
the whole timeout. Thirty seconds, down from a minute, because the build
it waits on is warm now.
Two follow-ups to the marking commit.
`Dev.eval_expr`'s new wait matched `Stopped _`, which fires on the first
iteration when the program is already parked on something else — the
break loop allows evaluating, so that is reachable — and answers for a
thunk that has not run yet, on a reply whose own `:condition` names the
other condition. It now waits for `Stopped "Pause"`, which the agent
reports under a nested break because `condition_name` is overwritten on
the way in and restored on the way out. `dev-pause.flan` grows a
`Missing` and a `boom` so the test can park the program on something
else first and tell the two apart.
And the flake NEXT.md had as "seen once and unexplained": `the daemon
never listened` is not a race, it is an llc-and-link of the whole
program before `flan dev` binds — ~600ms idle, measured at 6.6s and 6.8s
with the rest of the suite beside it, against a 5s and 8s await. All
three test binaries now wait a minute; the watchdog is what bounds the
run. Two consecutive full runs green.
Finishes DISCUSS.md §9's `pause` marking: the daemon half was already
built, this is the editor half plus the one daemon path it was missing.
`C-u C-c C-c` marks the form point is inside, `C-u C-u C-c C-c` the
top-level form (stop on entry), `C-u C-x C-e` the expression before
point. The buffer is never edited — the position rides beside the code
and the `(pause)` call goes into the tree after parsing, so no source
location moves.
`C-x C-e`'s path needed the daemon: its 5s `wait` answered "the program
did not reach a frame boundary", which is exactly what a thunk parked at
a breakpoint looks like from out here. `wait` is now three-way and asks
`state t = Stopped` only when a pause was requested, so the no-pause
shape `test_dev.ml` pins is unchanged.
The overlay is an annotation and not feedback, so unlike an error marker
it survives `pre-command-hook`; what takes it down is an accepted
evaluation with no `:pause` on it, which is the same thing that takes
the mark itself down.
Tests: a `test_dev.ml` block over the new `dev-pause.flan` that marks,
stops, re-evaluates plainly and then polls half a second confirming it
does not stop again — one sample after `continue` proves nothing, the
resumed frame is still in the old body — and an `emacs/test-flan-dev.el`
block for which form a prefix picks, the byte column, the overlay's
lifetime, and one live round trip.
PORTING.md Tier 1 item 5. The spy half of the watch was already built — the
pushed table, the buffer, the inline ghost text. What was missing is spy-num,
which is the part that item calls least obvious and most valuable, and it is
what this is.
A slot keeps count, min, max, last and mean. Each answers a question you can
ask without building a query: n is the first thing wrong when a loop is wrong,
the range is what one sample can never show you, last is what the scalar watch
would have given you, and the mean is a running sum divided at read time
because a mean accumulated as a mean drifts. A small ring of the last N
samples was the other candidate and loses — N out of 91,200 is a sample of the
tail of the loop rather than of the loop, and past five numbers every richer
answer is a UI for building a query.
The write path does no formatting, which is the feature rather than an
optimisation: a snprintf per sample at thousands a frame is a HUD that costs
more than the game. A sample is a load, five compares and the slot's seqlock;
the listener thread renders once per editor tick.
The window is since the editor's last tick, and that is a deliberate
divergence from watch.clj, where the stats are cumulative until reset-spies!.
Cumulative min and max reach the session's extremes within seconds of play and
then never move again, so the two most useful of the five go dead exactly when
you start interacting with the thing you are debugging — and this tool exists
to show you a number while you drag the mouse. Reset is its own message and
never a side effect of reading, because a destructive read makes looking
change what is there and anything that polls would shorten the window under
the editor that owns it. It bumps one epoch counter and clears no slot; a slot
clears itself on its next sample, so the reader never writes the table.
Ghost text needed one character. The call regexp allowed one hyphenated
segment, so watch-num-i64 backtracked to failure and a numeric watch got no
inline value while appearing normally in the buffer.
dune test is green, run twice. HANDOFF-f3.md carries the reasoning, the two
small gaps left behind it, and what did not work on the way.
C-u before an eval marks a form so the program stops when it runs
(DISCUSS.md 9). The mark arrives as a position in a separate :pause field
and is applied to the Ast after parsing: splicing text into the source
would move every line and column after it, and the error overlays, the
layout, the break loop's frame locations and DWARF all read those.
Ast.mark_pause puts a (pause) call at whatever starts at that position --
wrapping a sub-expression in a do, or going to the front of a defn's body,
since a declaration cannot be wrapped. A position that matches nothing is
refused rather than installed unmarked, which would report a breakpoint
that is not there.
It sticks with no extra state: the marked declaration is what goes into
the session, so an ordinary C-c C-c over the same form clears it.
The daemon half only; the Emacs command and its overlay are not built.
HANDOFF-f2.md has the rest, in order.
INCOMPLETE AND NOT WIRED IN. lib/x86.ml is not in lib/dune, so nothing
compiles it and nothing calls it; `dune test --root . -j 1` was green at
the tip this branched from and is unaffected, because no file the build
reads was changed. The module itself has never been type-checked.
What is here: the instruction encoder (integer and SSE, loads and stores
at every width, division, shifts, setcc, rip-relative addressing, rep
movsb), the layout bridge to Emit.lay, the frame allocator, and the
.rodata constant emitters. What is not here: the expression lowering,
the call sequence, the function prologue and epilogue, the assembly file
assembly, the build.ml flag and the differential harness. The header
comment is the design; the second half of the file is missing.
THE INTERNAL CONVENTION, which is the decision hardest to recover from
the code, and which is chosen rather than inherited:
- Scalars -- integers, bool, ptr, enum, handle, allocator, Fn -- in
SysV's integer registers rdi rsi rdx rcx r8 r9, then right to left
on the stack. bool is one byte, zero-extended on load.
- Floats in xmm0-xmm7, then on the stack.
- EVERY aggregate by pointer. An argument is a pointer to a copy the
caller made; a return is a hidden sret pointer in the FIRST integer
register with every other argument shifted along, and that same
pointer comes back in rax. Nothing is classified, nothing is split
across register classes, there is no eightbyte rule.
- The transfer channel is the last argument of all, a pointer, in the
integer sequence -- emit.ml's `signature` rule, unchanged. It is a
pointer to a pointer: main allocates one cell, stores null, and
threads its address down; a callee that transfers stores non-null
into it and every caller loads, tests and branches to its pad.
- Frame: every intermediate value is a frame temporary, bump-allocated
below rbp with a high-water mark, and the outgoing-argument area is
reserved once in the prologue. rsp is written exactly twice, by the
prologue's sub and by leave. So rsp % 16 == 0 at every call site is
a property of one rounded sub, and the spike's depth counter is not
needed -- its bug class is removed rather than guarded against.
WHY THE CONVENTION IS OURS TO PICK, confirmed rather than assumed: a dev
build compiled by this backend never emits a .ll at all, and a release
build never runs this backend, so no process holds code from both. The
only boundary that must match SysV exactly is C, and check.ml rejects an
aggregate in a `declare` while the generated shim flattens every struct,
so no Flan-emitted call ever hands C an aggregate. I found no path that
mixes the two backends in one process. I did NOT get far enough to test
that claim by running anything, so it stands on reading build.ml's
`executable` and emit.ml's `signature`, not on an experiment.
WHAT THE MEASUREMENT SAYS, and it is the one new fact this branch has.
spike/backend/hist.ml histograms Tast nodes over a program after Reach
prunes it. Item 15's four buckets undercount what a whole-program build
must do on day one:
- enum-compare.flan needs Str, Make, Field and Call before it prints
anything, because the prelude builds a slice to print one. Aggregates
are not a later row; they are in the first program.
- loops.flan carries Handled, RestartCase and Signal one each. The
"no plan" row is in the reachable set of a program that only loops,
so conditions cannot be deferred behind a whole-program flag.
- The text primitives (Bytes, I64ToBytes, WriteStdout) are C calls,
not instruction work, so they are cheap.
WHAT THE NEXT PERSON SHOULD DO FIRST, in order:
1. Finish the lowering as destination-driven: `eval f e ~dst` writes
e's value into [rbp+dst] and nothing is ever live in a register
across a statement. That is what makes aggregates and scalars one
code path and what keeps the frame model's promise.
2. Emit an assembly file -- .byte blobs with `call sym` and
`.long lbl - . - 4` for the few relocated fields -- and add the
flag to build.ml as FLAN_X86 plus an `opts` field, off by default.
Do not write an ELF writer; it produces no Flan progress and a bug
in it looks exactly like an encoding bug.
3. Copy test/test_sanitize.ml's shape for the differential harness.
There is no differential run yet, so nothing about correctness has
been demonstrated on this branch.
4. Bounds checks are implementable and should not be skipped:
flan_bounds_error(ptr, i64, i64, i64, ptr) and flan_slice_error
take the transfer channel, so they are an ordinary guarded call.
THE TWO LANGUAGE PREREQUISITES, unchanged and still not decided here.
Uninit is the one that bites: this backend gives whatever the stack slot
held, LLVM may reason from poison, and that is the one construct where
the two backends are supposed to differ. Division by zero, INT64_MIN/-1
and the float-to-int cast are the other three that x86 answers
differently from LLVM's "undefined" -- idiv raises SIGFPE where LLVM
says nothing, and cvttsd2si answers the integer indefinite value. The
Fn-value question -- body pointer or cell pointer -- is untouched: the
lowering here would have emitted direct calls, which means no
redefinition, and that is a gap to close before this backend is the dev
backend rather than an experiment.
