Two claims corrected against the thing they claimed about.
A named object is linked whole -- symbol-driven selection is an archive rule,
and dropping unreached code inside an included object needs -ffunction-sections
and --gc-sections, which the link line does not pass. nm on any corpus program
finds flan_dyn_add and flan_gc_collect in it. So the file said something the
build does not do. What makes --no-gc possible is the other half of the same
argument and was already written beside it: nothing refers to flan_dyn.c, so
not compiling it is a change at three sites and nowhere else.
And the boundary. "Typed Flan has no implicit widening" is true of a value and
not of a literal: (g 1) against (defn g [x f64] ...) compiles, because the
checker gives the literal the type the parameter asks for, while (defn h [y
i64] f64 (g y)) is refused. A dyn value written as 1 has been through
flan_dyn_from_i64 and cannot remember, so the same source read as dyn traps
where read as typed it does not. Stated where the compiler lane will find it,
with the two ways to close it, both of them the compiler's.
Milestone 1 of dynamic-by-default, the runtime half: NaN-boxed values in one
machine word, a mark-sweep heap, and the operations over them.
A double is itself, which is what a language with a physics loop and a float
calculator in its corpus wants; everything else hides in the quiet-NaN space,
three tag bits and a 48-bit payload that is exactly an x86-64 user pointer.
The negative-NaN collision is answered by canonicalising every NaN on the way
in, which flan_rt.c had already decided was the right thing to print. An i64
past the payload goes on the heap rather than becoming a 48-bit integer with a
64-bit name.
The collector is mark-sweep and nothing else -- no generation, no barrier, no
free list -- because the answer to wanting it faster is to type the program.
Roots are pushed, not scanned: NaN-boxing makes a conservative guess wrong in
both directions, and flan_dev.c's frame chain is the precedent. A fixed ring
of the last sixty-four allocations is marked unconditionally, which closes the
window where an expression with two constructors in it can collect its own
first result before the compiler has rooted either.
A type mismatch traps rather than aborting, through a flan_trap exported from
flan_rt.c so it takes the same path the six existing traps take: parked for
inspection in a dev session, dead where it stands otherwise. The sentence
names the operation, both tags as words, and both values.
flan_dyn.c is its own translation unit and nothing in the release runtime
names a symbol in it, so a program with no dyn operation links no collector
and --no-gc can be file-level selection rather than an argument with the
linker.
docs/SPIKE-DYNAMIC.md carries the argument. test/dyn_ops.c drives every
operation and all twenty-four refusals from C, the way dev_limits.c does,
including a million allocations against a hundred live and the control that
says an unrooted object really is reclaimed.
