FIX.org, NEXT.md, DISCUSS.org, docs/DISCUSS.md and the session handoff at the
root are one TODO.org now: 293 entries under seven subsystem headings, each
carrying an org keyword that says where it stands. A DONE entry is a few lines
saying what was decided and what that rules out; the reasoning that would not
compress — the embedding spike and the four reports the hand-written x86
backend was built from — moved into docs/BUILT.md instead, and its entries
point there in one line.
Every entry was checked against the tree before it got a keyword, and the
prose was wrong in both directions. Things the deleted files called open were
built: the first-evaluation stall, main being redefinable, macro parameter
lists, the type-limit constants, the array constructors, the byte fills,
inc/dec, the discard's fontification, the Emacs buffers, rt_die's _exit, the
backtrace surface, and the acceptance failure that could print and still exit
zero. Things they called done were not: the backend reports' no-plan buckets
had gone stale in the other direction, the value-dependent defvar was
superseded rather than built, and macro-expansion source locations are on an
unmerged lane, so that entry is NEXT and names the branch.
Every comment that cited one of the five by name now cites a heading that
exists, in TODO.org or in docs/BUILT.md. The session reports under
docs/handoffs/ keep naming the files they worked on, because rewriting them
would falsify what those sessions did; each carries a note saying where the
content went.
spec-memory.md's case 2, capture by value into a stack environment, and
the calling convention the author's rulings asked for.
(Fn [i32] i32) captures; {code, env}; the common case
(CFn [i32] i32) the bare address; one word; cannot capture
A local of the enclosing function that an fn names is copied into a
struct the checker synthesises, held in a slot of that function's frame,
and the value carries its address; the lifted body reads the copies back
into named slots of its own, once, at entry. So the name in the body
means what the local held at the instant the value was made --
fn-capture.flan changes the local through a pointer after the value
exists and the fn still answers with the old one.
Two types rather than a uniform environment parameter: "while it's dyn
first, static side should never have to pay the price for the existence
of the dyn side... if you fully opt out, for instance, using --no-gc
flag, then we should be operating under Odin/C semantics and never paying
any runtime costs." The environment is declared by exactly the bodies an
(Fn ...) value can reach -- a lifted literal in an Fn position, every
handler clause, and the widening thunks -- and by nothing else. An
ordinary defn emits the signature it always did; calc-me and fourteen
corpus programs were diffed to say so.
CFn, because the C carries information: a value with no environment is
the only kind that could ever cross to C, and under the --no-conditions
direction FIX.org records it becomes literally a C function pointer. It
is not that today -- a declare cannot take a function type at all -- and
crossable's refusal says so where a reader would otherwise be misled.
Nobody needs CFn: Fn accepts everything, and the commonest reason to
reach for the narrow one is that a *named* function handed to an Fn pays
a hop through the widening thunk where a CFn is a direct call.
That thunk is one small function per distinct signature widened, which
reads the bare address back out of the environment and calls it. The
cheaper trick -- the environment last, ignored by a body that never
declared it -- is legal under SysV and is a trap under wasm32's
call_indirect, which compares the signature at the call. Every indirect
call is exactly typed now.
A handler clause captures the same way and is sound with nothing left
over: its frame is popped by the body that pushed it. What is refused
there is a *store* into a captured name -- it is a copy, and writing to
it would leave the local as it was.
And the other half, which is what "non-escaping" means: a value carrying
an environment may be called, passed down and let-bound, and may not be
returned, stored, pointed at or pushed into a container. A parameter of
type Fn is treated as one, which answers "passed to something that stores
it" with no interprocedural analysis -- the store is refused inside the
callee. Everything of type CFn is clean for free, which is the second
thing having two types buys. Every refusal names case 3, the environment
the collector owns.
Two pre-existing bugs fell out on the way. A lifted fn asked for Fnval,
so `flan reload' on any function containing an fn literal died at llc
with an undefined cell; it takes Flanfn now, which is the choice a
handler clause always made. And a redefinition module now carries its
own hidden copy of every thunk it names, which is the same bug shape
caught before it shipped.
The author: "I think I prefer length over len, because then I'll use len as
the variable name". One arm in check.ml, one row in the table beside it, and
every (len x) in lib, test, examples, vendor, spike, docs, web, emacs,
plan.org and NEXT.md rewritten.
Shadowing and builtin/ had already taken most of the sting out: a (defn len
...) was legal and won in its own file, and builtin/len reached past it. What
was left is that len was still a builtin — the defn earned a warning, and a
wrapper had to say builtin/ at every inner call. Now there is nothing under
the short name: len is an ordinary identifier in every position, which is
what (let [len (length xs)] ...) wants.
length takes over as shadowing's worked example rather than the feature
losing one. shadow-builtin.flan, builtin-qualified.flan, pkgs/shadowed and the
builtin/ rows in test_flan move to it and go on testing shadowing.
A call to a len nothing defines is answered where an unknown function is,
after every table and after the shadowing guard, so a program with its own len
never reaches it. The sentence is said rather than guessed at — len and length
are three edits apart and the did-you-mean's net is one — and the call is
written back out through spell_arg, as-slice's spelling lifted out of it and
now shared, so what is printed compiles.
sand.flan:33 still calls the old name and is the author's to change; until it
does, test_acceptance and test_session abort there. Both were run green
against a copy with that one line changed. FIX.org says so.
(< a b c) was an arity error. The folding operators had taken two operands
or more since fold_left_prim went in; the six comparisons had not, and they
are the ones the game hit.
The orderings and = chain: (< a b c) is a below b and b below c, because the
left fold would compare a bool against a number. != does not — the author's
ruling is that (!= 1 2 1) should be false — so it asks about every pair,
Common Lisp's /=. Whether a sequence is increasing is a question about
neighbours; whether a set of values are all different is a question about the
set, and the pair chaining never looks at is the one that decides it.
Every operand is bound to a slot first, in source order, so an operand two
pairs name is evaluated once — the spelling a reader would write, (and (< a b)
(< b c)), evaluates b twice. The conjunction then stops at the first pair that
fails, with nothing observable riding on it: everything has already run.
At two operands both readings are one pair and neither goes through the n-ary
lowering, so every comparison there is emits what it always did. (< x) joins
(+) and (- x) as a refusal — it would be true whatever it was handed.
rand-int, rand, rand-bool, rand-int-range and rand-float-range, at the widths
the author ruled: a u64 draw and an f64 in [0, 1). rand-seed and rand-state
keep their names. The four old names are not names, and each is refused by the
one that is, with a call that compiles — in both the call and the bare-name
position, because a Lisp-1 makes the second a real thing to write.
The generator's step is untouched, so a seed means what it meant. Its output
function is not: PCG-XSH-RR folded the state to 32 bits, and no honest u64 or
53-bit f64 comes out of 32 bits without a second step. PCG-RXS-M-XS 64 answers
64 from the same one, so all five still cost exactly one draw and a seeded run
is reproducible. The price, written where it lives: the permutation is a
bijection of the state, which is what 64 output bits from 64 state bits costs.
The sequence is therefore a different one, and programs/rand.flan pins it —
reproducibility across the five, the single-draw cost of each, the half-open
boundaries, and rand-bool's count over a thousand flips.
sand.flan is not touched. It calls rand-f32, so the cases that compile or
re-evaluate it skip themselves on the fixture rather than on a comment: fix
its two calls and every one of them runs again. Its hash is the old
generator's grid and gets re-taken then.
($u x) was an unknown function in the same body where (vec-new $u) was an
unbound type variable, because the cast arm did not take the sigil clause
type_named took. It takes it now, so one mistake has one story.
And the story was a rule rather than an answer: "only a defn signature can"
is what to say when nothing is in scope to name — a struct field, a global —
but inside a signature that introduces $t, the name that was meant is almost
always t. It names them. Which names those are comes from tyvars abstractly
and from subst inside an instantiation, because a body is checked under both
and reading one would answer the same mistake two ways in a single run.
(i32 (at xs i)) inside a body bounded integer? was refused with "i32
converts a number, found t". Arithmetic, comparison, min/max, the
bitwise fold and the shifts all ask the where clause; the conversions
were the family nobody had gone back to, and the cast block held three
arms of it.
The machine-type target asked Types.is_numeric of its operand and the
enum target asked Types.Int _, so a variable fell through both to the
refusal however it was bounded. The variable target had the opposite
defect: it asked the bound of the target and then took any generic
operand, so a second variable declared only ordered? passed the abstract
pass on the strength of a sentence about a different one. Nothing wrong
was ever emitted through it — ordered? admits numbers and enums and both
convert at the instantiation — which is exactly why it is worth closing:
the hole opens the day ordered? admits a type that does not.
The rule is the repo's own, applied to a set instead of a type: a
conversion is legal at a bounded variable exactly when it is legal at
every type the bound admits. A machine-type target needs numeric?, an
enum target needs integer? because numeric? admits the floats the
concrete arm refuses, and ordered?/equal?/hashable? admit nothing — the
last by what the predicate says rather than by the set it denotes, since
hashable? already admits strings and ordered? may.
Both float targets and the narrowing i32 stay legal: (f64 i64-x) rounds
above 2^53 and (i32 f64-x) truncates where the types are written, and a
generic that refused what its copies accept would be the fork the rule
forbids. FIX.org, 2026-09-21, has the account, and records what this
costs: no predicate now licenses a generic enum to integer conversion,
and enum? is the eventual answer.
The refusal says what the variable is known to be and what to write, in
the clause spelling unconstrained already uses: a body with no clause
gets the clause, a body that has one is told which predicate to add.
(vec-new $t) in a generic body was refused as if it had said nothing about
its element type. The feature was not missing: env.tyvars and env.subst are
keyed on the bare name, and type_named and the cast arm asked them of the
name as written, so the spelling with the sigil fell past the guard into the
no-element-type message. (vec-new t) had always worked.
One helper the three of them share, beside resolve_name, which already
stripped for itself. A sigil on a name nothing binds reaches resolve_name
now too, so it is answered as the unbound variable it is.
Three things the review found, and the refusal it was right about.
The returned-Vec refusal is gone. It called a leak a dangle: the storage a
returned Vec owns outlives the expression, so the view reads what it says it
reads, and what is lost is the owner. (len (mk)) and (at (mk) 0) lose the same
owner and compile, spec-memory.md already says an overwritten global Vec leaks
its first block, and under a region there is nothing to leak at all. "We're
purposely doing manual memory management for the static side, so whatever."
The array refusal stays exactly as it is — that one is a view into a frame
that is gone and answers bytes the frame has since reused. Wrong answers are
the compiler's business and leaks are the program's, and both docs now draw
that line, because the two forms look alike.
The -1 sentinel was reachable from user syntax: (slice v 0 -1) answered the
whole Vec on both backends while (slice a 0 -1) was refused as a negative
bound. The refusal now runs on the bounds the reader wrote, before the
implicit hi is built — the only order that works, since the sentinel is itself
a -1 and a check on the finished pair would refuse (slice v). The
backwards-pair check moved into the branch where both ends are written.
The bounds seam is closed toward index_expr, and the tiebreaker is not which
half is older. indexed and vec_at both take their index through it, so
(at a c) over a u32 compiled where (slice a c) did not: the fork was between
slice and at as much as between two targets. A bound is a subscript.
Also an x86 row for vec.flan, so the new arity is pinned on both backends in
CI rather than by hand, and the comment columns the sweep shifted left in
slurp, into, format and algorithms.
as-slice was a warning, not an operation. The input type already decides
which of the two things happens — a Vec can only be borrowed, an array or a
string can only be viewed, and no call site picks between them — so the second
name expressed no choice a reader could make. And it warned at the moment the
view is taken, which is the one moment nothing is wrong; the danger arrives
later, at the push. slice now takes a Vec at all three arities and as-slice
is gone.
(slice v lo) was free, and is the arity the Vec never had: the runtime already
reads a hi of -1 as "to the end", so the tail form passes the caller's lo and
the same -1 — no slot, no length read, no second evaluation. The merge is
entirely in the checker; the Vec path builds the flan_vec_as_slice call it
always built and neither backend has a line about any of it.
A Vec a call returned is refused at every arity, and not for the array's
reason. (slice (mk)) over an array dangles. (slice (make-vec)) does not — the
storage outlives the expression — but the header is a temporary, so nothing
can ever free the block. The refusal says that and names the let.
The name's own refusal sits in ordinary_call after every table, so a program
that defines an as-slice still reaches its own. It reads for somebody who has
never heard of the old name and writes the call back out, spelling each
argument that is a name or a number.
The warning moved to where it bites: BUILT.md gains a section beside the Vec
table and the push row points at it, spec-memory.md's Borrowing says the same.
Investigated and deliberately not built — a diagnostic for a live view at the
push. (reserve v 100) then a slice, a push and a read is correct code under
the contract the spec chose, so any flag on it is a false positive by the
language's own semantics rather than by an approximation. FIX.org has the
finding and the syntactic sketch that does not work.
"Is there a way to do dotimes or a loop in reverse?" — the answer was a
hand-written let plus set. Now it is (dotimes [i 9 -1 -1]).
Three arities: [i n], [i start stop], [i start stop step]. The stop is
exclusive in all of them, so [i 0 n] is [i n] — one rule, not two — and a
negative step counts down, testing with > instead of <.
A literal step of 0 is refused where it is written. One that is only a value
cannot be, so the condition asks the sign first and 0 falls out of it as a
loop that runs no times: terminating and deterministic, and free, because a
literal step still emits the single comparison it always did.
Each bound is evaluated once, left to right, before the counter exists: the
start into the counter, the stop into the hidden slot it always had, the
step into one of its own unless it is a literal.
Still a special form, still a Let and a While with the step in the latch, so
neither backend learned anything — the new program prints the same thing
under --x86 and at -O0. load.ml's Form-level walk had to learn more than one
bound for the same reason parse.ml did; it is part of this feature and not a
bug that was sitting there, because before this a three-bound dotimes was a
parse error long before that walk could reach it.
The author's ruling: "I think the prefix reads better, keep it" — so two
prefixed enums out of eleven was the inconsistency, not the prefix.
TraceLogLevel takes log-, CameraProjection projection-, CameraMode camera-,
GamepadButton button-, GamepadAxis axis-, Gesture gesture-, MouseCursor
cursor-, TextureFilter filter-, PixelFormat pixel-.
Two of those are judgement. CameraProjection and CameraMode share raylib's
CAMERA_ and deliberately do not share a Flan prefix: they are two questions
asked of the same struct, and :projection-perspective beside :camera-orbital
says which is being answered. GamepadButton and GamepadAxis take the short
stems rather than a shared gamepad-, which keeps :button-left-face-up and
:axis-left-trigger readable.
It is a reading choice and not a collision fix, and bindings, raylib.flan and
docs/BUILT.md all say so: a keyword resolves against the expected type and
nothing else, so :point at a TextureFilter site was never ambiguous. What the
prefix buys is the call site read on its own.
The three constant exception lines are keyed on the member's full Flan
spelling and moved with it. flan generate-c vendor/raylib is green against
raylib-5.5.h, and the check was confirmed non-vacuous by breaking it:
filter-trilinearr reported TEXTURE_FILTER_TRILINEARR rather than passing.
test_flan pins one member of each of the eleven to the C name the rule
reaches, read out of the real bindings file.
sand.flan line 121 is (rl/set-trace-log-level :warning) and is the author's
to respell. TraceLogLevel carries a warning alias beside log-warning, mapped
by name in bindings, so the suite stays green until he does; FIX.org has the
three-edit removal recipe.
Three defects, all from lifting every def initialiser, none of which the
suite caught:
A def typed fresh into a live session came up zero and stayed zero. The
image flan_dev_global copies on the allocation is the only value a new
global ever gets — the host's .init-globals never calls its initialiser —
and both backends chose that image with Tast.const_init, which a def's
lifted Call fails by construction. Emit.initial_image reads the constant
back out of the lifted body; the x86 twin had the same bug.
Changing a global between def and defonce was silently ineffective: the
guard lives in the startup function compiled into the host, which a reload
cannot republish. Session.compatible refuses both directions and says to
restart; editing the value stays allowed.
And global/<n> no longer leaks into the signature refusal when a def is
retyped — the global loop names the same fact in words a reader can act on.
flan check prints def, defonce or defconst off grerun; (defvar) with no
arguments names the shapes rather than offering (defonce ); the docs,
plan.org, runtime comments and valgrind.supp are swept; BUILT.md states
the release-build cost and the uninit caveat.
The trio the author decided on 2026-09-20 is now all built: def is CL's
defparameter — its initialiser runs on every daemon re-run, unguarded, so
an edited initialiser repaints the same storage on C-c C-c plus re-run —
defonce (Clojure's name for CL's defvar, per the author) initialises once
behind the .init~once. flag, and defconst stays the image.
One parse arm reads both forms; the difference is Ast.reinit, carried to
Tast.global's grerun. Emit.startup_plan gives a def no guard flag, and
Check.check_global lifts every def initialiser — zero and literal
included — into global/<n>, so the host's startup reaches it through the
function cell and a re-evaluated def swaps it (Session's def_inits;
Emit.redefinition declares the cell for a non-sibling target). The old
defvar spelling is refused with the rename and both compiling spellings,
and every program, test, doc and editor list is swept — except sand.flan,
the author's live WIP, whose seven defvar lines are flagged in FIX.org
and keep its three dependent tests red on this branch.
A fixed array does not decay to a slice at a call, so passing one to a
function over [$t] meant writing (slice a 0 (len a)) at every call site.
(slice a) is the whole of it now and (slice a n) is the tail from n, filled
in by check.ml into the three-argument form: same node, same static bound
checks, same runtime trap, and on a fixed array the implicit length is the
constant (len a) already folds to. Neither backend grew an arity case. A
target that is not already a name goes through a slot first, so (slice (f x))
calls f once.
at and slice also reach a string, because (bytes s) was the only route to a
byte and it is about to start copying. (at s i) is the byte, bounds-checked;
(slice s ...) at all three arities answers a string viewing the same bytes,
not a [u8], which would be a writable-looking view of storage the program
does not own.
Neither is a place, and the refusal lives in [indexed] rather than in
check_place, which is the part that matters. There are three routes to a
Pindex and they share no code: check_place, the single-index set arm that
checks its own target, and addr. Asked in check_place, the question is
answered for two of them and missed for the one a person writes — a store
into a string literal compiled, and the backends disagreed about it. So
[indexed] takes a ~place location and asks at every dimension, because
(at g 0 0) over a [[2 string]] reaches the string only at the last step.
One message, and addr gets it too, so it reads as value-versus-place rather
than as a rule about assignment.
Slicing an array a call returned is refused at every arity. The view
outlives the temporary, both backends print whatever the frame reused, and
nothing traps — which was already true of (slice (mk) 0 3) and only
survivable while nobody wrote it. (slice (mk)) is short enough to become a
habit. An array literal is not this case and stays legal.
Two backend cases. emit.ml's element_addr grew the String arm beside the
Slice one. x86.ml's index_len had answered None for a string — correct while
nothing could index one, and a skipped bounds check the moment something
could — and now reads the length word, so both check the same thing.
The INSERTIONSORT crash, all three rulings (FIX.org 2026-09-20):
- (bytes s) allocates a writable copy through the allocator surface —
context or (bytes s a), StorageExhausted with retry, a registry note in
dev builds (flan_bytes_dup, lowered like vec-new). (bytes-view s) is the
old zero-cost reinterpret, renamed, read-only by convention; every
in-repo reader swept over to it. (string b) unchanged.
- String constants were already read-only on both backends at -O0; now
pinned — bytes-copy.flan rows on LLVM/-O0/--x86, and dies_segv rows
asserting the write-through-view trap on both backends.
- A dev build installs a SIGSEGV/SIGBUS handler by the same dev-only
constructor slot that arms the registry: one line naming the address and
the innermost frame, then the trap-hook park — stopped, not dead, the
daemon serving. No agent: message and re-raise. Release builds untouched.
Pinned by trap_park over dev-segv.flan.
Arguments print in order with a single space between each pair, println
ending the line; (println) is the newline alone and (print) is nothing.
The checker's arm renders each argument exactly as it did alone, so typed
and dyn values mix in one call, one-argument sites are byte-identical, and
an unprintable argument is still refused at its own span.
Key members are :key-r, :key-space, :key-left-shift; MouseButton members
are :mouse-left through :mouse-back — mouse- over button- because gamepads
have buttons too. Bare members collided across enums and with user code.
The bindings enum directive grew an optional third column declaring the
Flan-side member prefix, stripped before the C prefix is applied, so key-r
checks against KEY_R rather than KEY_KEY_R; a member that does not carry
the declared prefix is reported, not checked under a guessed name. The
enum-member error grew a did-you-mean: one edit away, or the bare name of
a prefixed member, so :r suggests :key-r.
sand.flan is the author's live WIP and is deliberately not touched; its
three keywords (lines 161-166) leave test_session and sand-headless red
until he moves them. Everything else that calls the two enums moved.
A narrower scalar at a $t a slice already fixed widens into the fixed
type — the same cast a monomorphic parameter applies — where the old
rule refused both directions. One accepts pin, one runtime line in
int-generic.flan, and the web page's predicate table catches up: five
predicates, integer? at the head, and the entailment chain grown one
link.
The fifth predicate: integer? admits every integer kind and no float,
entails numeric? (and through it ordered? and equal?), and gates what
only integers support — the bitwise fold asks for it, the shifts admit
a bounded variable under it, and the float literal in an integer? body
is refused in the bound's own words. The literal arm needed nothing:
the entailment admits an integer constant under either bound.
abs-i32 and abs-i64 collapse into one integer?-bounded generic whose
i32/i64 copies even keep the old symbols; abs-f32/abs-f64 stay as the
float spellings because the right float abs is a sign-bit clear no
integer body spells, and (abs 1.5) now refuses naming the bound — the
where clause is checked before the name-collision check, which used to
answer that call with 'abs-f64 is already defined'.
Mixed widths at one $t join at the wider type now, in either argument
order — the author reversed the refuse-both rule on 2026-09-20. A
joinless pair is deferred and re-asked against the final binding, so a
later wider argument settles u32-vs-i32; u64-vs-i64 still refuses, and
a container-bound variable still binds exactly. The out-widened
arguments catch up through the ordinary Cast.
Two review follow-ups folded in: a struct field's unknown-lowercase
message stops suggesting a parameter vector it does not have, and the
tyvar-at-dyn message says defgeneric/defmethod in words instead of a
schematic that does not compile.
