render.ml's output is parsed by emacs/flan-inspect.el, which hard-codes
the colon when it reads a field out of a rendered struct. Moving the
printer on its own would break inspection in the dev loop without
breaking a test that says so, so the printer waits and moves with its
reader, in the Emacs lane.
The sweep could not tell a rendered *expectation* from a Flan *source*
snippet -- both are strings in a test -- so it converted both. The suite
named every one it got wrong, and those are back.
emacs/test-flan-dev.el:415 is the one edit inside emacs/: Flan source sent
to the daemon for eval, which the parser now refuses in the old spelling.
One label, in a fixture.
C-c C-b asks layout with the condition's own name and draws the fields under
it. The values stay refused, by name, because the shape of a condition is a
fact about the build and its contents are a fact about the stopped frame — and
only one of those is knowable today. A layout the daemon refuses is nil rather
than an error: the buffer already draws a section saying why one is empty, and
failing the whole command would take away the restarts over an annotation.
The manual described the signature-change refusal as though it were the
design. It is not, and session.ml already said so at the refusal: a
signature change should make a new version, leave old callers on the old
one, and warn at the stale sites. plan.org calls it signature generations
and stale-caller warnings, and it is milestone 7's unfinished half.
The struct-layout rejection is the decided one and stays. Conflating them
made a placeholder look like a rule.
The site's Emacs section is a key table and four paragraphs -- a
reference for someone who already knows the shape. This is the other
document: how to set it up, what the loop actually is, what each buffer's
own keys do, and what to do when something is refused.
The three buffer keymaps were never written down anywhere a user would
look; they were only in the define-key calls.
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.
A let-bound local is its own name under lldb now, and a redefinition
module carries DWARF when the daemon was asked for it.
Resolved against the println track in session.ml: the thunk keeps the
render walk's appended slots and gains the names beside them, the walk's
own scratch having none to keep.
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.
A restart the innermost frame shadows could be seen and not taken;
it is taken by position now, off a snapshot that stopped moving under
the break loop. The editor half this was briefed as building already
existed — the stale line that said otherwise is fixed.
The snapshot made the listing stand still; it did not make the handoff safe.
A choice is validated against the snapshot on top when the request lands and
resolved against the snapshot on top when the game thread next looks, and
between those the loop runs evaluations — one that errors pushes a break of
its own, whose loop reaches the flag first and takes its own index 2 for the
one somebody picked off the outer list. That is the failure this change exists
to end, arriving by a different door.
So each snapshot carries a generation, a choice carries the generation it was
validated against, and a loop claims only what is addressed to it. A mismatch
is left set rather than dropped: the listener already answered ok, so the break
it was meant for must still be able to take it. Depth could not do this — an
outer break resuming and a new one starting reuses the number. The snapshot is
also popped before the depth comes down now, so the two never describe
different breaks.
The client's own new path gets tested too: the candidate table is pure, so the
shapes a real daemon will not easily produce are checked directly, and the
break-and-resume test now goes through restart-at rather than by name.
flan-dev-unreachable-restarts was dead on arrival — flan-break reads
:unreachable off its own reply — and is gone.
now lists the restarts by position and sends the position, with the
name alongside as the receipt the program checks. A restart below the
evaluation the break is inside is shown marked rather than hidden: someone who
can see a restart in their own source and not on this list has been told
nothing, and the refusal carries the reason.
session.ml already had this: a compile-time walk over a Tast type that
emits the calls to print a value of it, handling every concrete type the
language has. It was dev-build-only and went to flan_dev_emit, and
prelude.ml justified the per-type print-* functions by saying a real
println had to wait for milestone 5 and generics. It did not. plan.org
specifies println as compiler-provided and per concrete type, which is
not overloading: there is nothing to dispatch on at run time and no
user-supplied printer to choose between, so no type variables appear.
The walk moves to render.ml, parameterised on an emitter and a slot
allocator. The emitter is five functions rather than five extern names
because the two sides are not both extern calls -- the REPL's are, and
stdout's compose a conversion with a write. The slot allocator differs
too: the REPL builds a thunk's frame, println takes slots from the
enclosing function being checked, once per call site.
Two runtime shims, both only reachable from the walk. flan_u64_to_bytes,
because routing u64 through the signed printer makes 0xFFFF...F read as
-1, which is the one way println could disagree with the REPL about a
value both can hold. flan_escape_bytes, so a string nested in a printed
structure is quoted and escaped -- same table as flan_dev_emit_str, noted
in both, because the REPL and println must not disagree about what a
struct looks like.
A string at top level prints raw and nested prints quoted. Not a conflict:
(println "hello") has to print hello, and a struct's string field has to
be distinguishable from the punctuation around it. The split is top-level
vs nested, so it lives in check.ml and not in the walk.
Found on the way: a field of an Option had no gep in emit.ml, so the
walk's Option arm had never run -- the REPL would have failed on one too.
Option is { i8, T } with no declared name, so its layout is now spelled
out. Nothing in the surface language reaches a field of an Option; the
printer does, to read the tag without unwrapping a None.
The print-* functions stay. They print without a newline, which println
cannot express -- slices.flan's show prints elements separated by spaces
-- and they are raw where print is structural.
println.flan covers every arm at -O0 and -O2: the u64, the raw/quoted
split, both Option arms, the depth and span caps, and the slice arm's
loop twice over plus once inside a dotimes, which is where per-call-site
slot allocation would show if it were per-iteration.
Two CIDER-shaped buffers: C-c C-i navigates a value, C-c C-b shows the
condition, the restarts and the stack. C-c C-M-b keeps the old one-key prompt.
The inspector needs no protocol change at all. eval-expr already answers a
rendered string, and Session.render writes exactly seven shapes, so that string
is a grammar. Navigation is a stack of *expressions* rather than of handles:
going into :pos sends (.pos b), into element 2 sends (at (.tags b) 2) - both
ordinary Flan a person could type. CIDER keeps its stack on the server because
a JVM value can be retained; nothing here can, since a Flan value has no header
and the render thunk is dlclosed the moment it returns. The view is therefore
never stale, where CIDER's shows the object as it was when you pushed. What it
buys over C-x C-e is the depth-4 span-8 bound: a field past it comes back as
... and nothing recovers it from the echo area, and re-rooting renders it from
depth 0.
SBCL decided the order - condition, restarts, then stack - because invoke-debugger
prints the condition and show-restarts and then stops; the backtrace is a command
you type. The restarts are the decision and the stack is the explanation for it.
And SBCL found a live bug. show-restarts omits the bracket on a name already
used further in, which is not decoration: §4 takes the first frame offering a
name, so a second frame offering retry is real, is on the list, and cannot be
chosen. The old prompt showed retry twice and sent the string either way, and
the inner frame took it silently. restarts.flan's own nested function has been
that counterexample since the transfer landed. The buffer draws the shadowed row
unbracketed and refuses RET on it by name, with a test asserting nothing was
sent - which stops the lie without restoring the choice. Taking a restart by
index is the fix and is recorded as such.
Sections that cannot be filled are drawn saying why rather than omitted: a
missing section cannot be told from an empty one, and only one of those is a
fact about the program.
Saying "the fields are not available" was under-claiming. A condition is a
struct, and Tast.structs holds every struct's field names and types in the
daemon, which owns the build — no running program is involved in answering
what a Missing is made of. Only the values need the pointer the break loop
was handed, and break_loop currently discards that pointer, so they are two
different gaps with two different fixes on two different sides of the socket.
The buffer now draws a field named and typed with its value refused, which is
what tells you whether the field you were about to blame is even a field of
this condition.
Navigation backwards was not the same list walked the other way. Forward
wrapped and backward stopped, and from the middle of a line the two disagreed
about where a field begins — a field line carries the property on all of it,
so a property-change walk from mid-line finds the end of the field you are
already in. Both now go through one list of field starts. The mid-line case
went red on the first try and the expectation was the thing that was wrong:
landing on the current field's start is what CIDER does and is the less
surprising of the two.
C-c C-b is a completing-read over restart names, which is the whole UI for
the one moment the dev loop exists to make survivable. It shows the names and
nothing else, and it will let you pick one that cannot be taken.
That last part is a bug, not a gap. §4 says restart lookup takes the first
frame offering a name, and flan_find_restart does exactly that; so a second
frame offering "retry" is real, is on the list, and is unreachable — picking
it sends the string "retry" and the inner frame runs, silently. SBCL has
shown this since forever by numbering the restarts and omitting the bracket
on a name already used. Taken as is, and the shadowed row now refuses by name
and says what would fix it: an index verb, which does not exist.
SBCL also decides the order. invoke-debugger prints the condition, then
show-restarts, and stops; the backtrace is a command you type. The restarts
are the decision and the stack is the explanation for it, and a debugger that
opens with forty frames has buried one under the other.
What CIDER's stacktrace buffer gives is the behaviour — frames that fold in
place, everything on the keyboard. Not its cause chain: a JVM exception wraps
another one and a Flan condition wraps nothing.
The fields, the stack and the locals are drawn as sections that say why they
are empty and what each would take. A section left out cannot be told from
one that happened to have nothing in it, and only one of those is a fact
about the program.
C-x C-e renders once and stops at depth 4 and span 8. A field past either
comes back as "..." and nothing recovers it from the echo area. Re-rooting
the walk at that field renders it from depth 0, so the bound moves with you
— that, and not tidiness, is why an inspector is worth having beside the
expression evaluator.
CIDER keeps its inspector stack on the server because a JVM value can be
retained. Nothing here can: a Flan value has no header and the thunk that
rendered it is dlclosed the moment it returns. So the stack is a stack of
expressions on this side, and going into a field means sending a different
one — (.pos b) where the last one was b. It costs a re-evaluation per step,
which buys a view that is never stale and is why refresh is a key someone
presses rather than a timer.
Driven from fixtures, which is also the only way the cases a live program
will not hold still for get tested at all.
The overlay half is checked as far as --batch allows and no further:
execute-kbd-macro runs no pre-command-hook there, so the hook is proved
installed in the right buffer and in nobody else's, and proved to clear and
uninstall when run — which is what the command loop does with it. That Emacs
runs it is Emacs' contract, and a test pretending to check it would be
checking nothing.
No DAP implementation here, and there should not be one. `flan build --debug'
puts DWARF in the executable, lldb reads it, lldb-dap speaks the protocol — so
what was actually missing was a dape-configs entry that knows to build a .flan
file first and where the binary lands.
The build goes through dape's own `compile' key rather than a shell-out, so a
rejected program lands in a compilation buffer and next-error walks it. Flan's
diagnostics are already file:line:col.
`flan-debug' goes through `dape--config-eval' and not `alist-get'. `dape'
takes a config whose forms are already evaluated — that is what M-x dape does
after reading one — and handing it the stored entry would pass the list
(flan-dape--binary (flan-dape--source)) to lldb as a program name. Driven
headlessly to prove it: a breakpoint set by line in the .flan buffer, hit,
reported as flan.tick at debug.flan:19 with c and n in scope.
The keybinding is registered from here rather than in flan-mode.el, so this
file is the only thing anyone has to load to get it and flan-mode keeps
working for someone who never installs dape.
The two frictions are written down at the bottom of flan-dape.el from lldb
transcripts, not from reasoning about what ought to happen, because the guess
I started from was wrong. Across a reload a breakpoint set by *name* gains a
second location and both stay live — the old body is still mapped and still
what old call sites reach. One set by *file and line* stops firing, and not
because dape pinned it to an address: the redefinition module has no line
table to resolve against. Given one, lldb does re-resolve on dlopen.
Which names the gap: Emit.redefinition takes ~debug and Session.eval does not
pass it, so `flan reload' and the `flan dev' daemon build modules without
DWARF. lib/session.ml is the dev loop's file, not this lane's.
test-flan-dape.el is not in dune test. It wants Emacs, dape, lldb-dap and a
built flan at once, and wiring four optional things into the acceptance table
would make that table's failures mean less, not more.
An overlay that lasted until the next accepted evaluation was a durable
annotation on the source, which is not what it is: it is feedback about the
action that just failed, and the moment you move, type or evaluate it is
describing a program state nobody is in any more.
pre-command-hook rather than post-command-hook, which fires at the end of
the failing command and would take the overlay down before redisplay ever
drew it. Buffer-local and installed only while an overlay exists, so a
session of twenty buffers does not end up running this on every keystroke
in all of them.
C-c C-a on a name, C-u for the IR. The header is SBCL's habit of saying
which function and out of what before a line of code, with one line it does
not have: what the answer claims. A reader looking at a listing will assume
it is what the program is running, and for a delivered-but-not-yet-installed
body that is exactly the thing that is not known — so the daemon's own
account of it sits above the first instruction rather than nowhere.
NEXT.md rewrapped to a wider column - a reflow, not a rewrite. The three TODO
entries in it are the substance: live disassembly of what is actually installed
in a cell, error overlays that vanish on the next thing you do rather than
surviving until an evaluation is accepted, and CL-style interactive recovery
where a stopped program offers a typed restart and the editor asks for the
value before invoking it.
flan-mode's declare-functions become real autoloads. A declare-function only
quiets the byte compiler; it does not load anything, so a user who had loaded
only flan-mode could not invoke M-x flan-dev at all.
A program that does not compile kills the daemon before it binds, which is
the failure anyone starting one from Emacs will actually hit. Showing that
buffer is the difference between a message and an answer.
The prompt also offers the program last started: a restart after a quit is
the common case, and it is rarely the buffer you happen to be reading when
you decide on it. C-c C-x does the restart without the prompt at all.
A struct whose layout moved cannot be installed into a program built with the
old one, and the daemon says so. There is no smaller answer than a rebuild: a
session's layouts and global types describe a process only if that session
compiled it, so the program and everything in its memory go too. That is the
cost, and it is why this is its own command and not something C-c C-c falls
back to.
Emacs owns the daemon now, so this is stop-and-start rather than a new op.
The old one is waited out first: it unlinks the socket as it leaves and would
otherwise take its successor's with it.
Also: quitting a daemon that would not close now says its program may have
outlived it, because killing the daemon skips the cleanup that signals the
child — and C-c C-v rather than C-c C-h for the doc buffer, which was
shadowing the way anyone discovers what is under C-c.
C-c C-h puts what the daemon knows about a name in a buffer instead: kind,
signature, and a button on the place it is written. No new protocol — defs
has carried all four facts since it existed.
Where there is no location it says so in M-.'s own words rather than leaving
the line out, because a missing line reads as "this name has no home" and
the truth is that Tast.global carries no Loc.
imenu and which-function come with it, and neither needs a program running:
they read the buffer, so they work on a file nobody has built yet and keep
working while it is stopped. Anchored at column 0, so a defn inside a let is
not offered as a definition of anything.
The daemon owns the program's lifetime, so the terminal it was started in
was also the only place that program could be stopped from. M-x flan-dev
builds, launches and connects; M-x flan-dev-quit ends it.
It waits for a connection rather than for the socket file to appear: the
daemon unlinks a stale socket before binding, so waiting on the file either
succeeds instantly against nothing or races the unlink. And when the daemon
dies before binding — which for a program that does not compile is the
ordinary failure — the refusal names its buffer, because that is where the
compiler's reason is and nothing this end sees says it.
The break loop was reachable from a raw socket. This is the half that makes
it reachable from an editor, and it all follows from one fact: a program
stops at a moment nobody asked about.
So the state is learned twice, on purpose. It rides on every reply, beside
the program's output and for the same reason -- the likeliest instant for a
program to stop is the one just after an evaluation, which is a reply the
client is already reading, and learning it a second later from a poll would
mean learning it after the echo area had said the evaluation was fine. And a
timer asks anyway, once a second with `describe', because a program that
stops in a frame of its own game loop produces no reply at all and folding
state into replies that never come says nothing. The timer never reconnects
-- that would quietly erase the `lost' state that exists to be seen -- and
skips while a request is in flight, since accept-process-output runs timers
and a poll firing inside a read would eat that read's reply.
Three ops: `break' for the restart names, `restart' and `abort'. The
annotation owns :stopped and :condition rather than the ops, so one place in
the daemon decides whether the program is stopped and the poll and the prompt
cannot disagree. "ok" from `restart' means accepted, not resumed: the choice
is validated against the stopped stack and taken when that thread next comes
round, so it says so and the client clears its own flag rather than polling
once, finding it stopped, and re-opening the prompt it just answered.
The agent grew one verb, `status', answered in both states. Everything else
the break loop offers is refused while running, rightly; but the question an
editor asks without already knowing had to have an answer either way or there
would be nothing to poll.
And flan_agent_poll had to become re-entrant, which was a bug rather than an
addition. A C-x C-e thunk may itself error, and the break loop that catches
it polls again from inside that call. The old loop cached both indices and
stored tail at the end, rewinding over everything the nested poll consumed --
re-running the thunk that had just stopped the program, which is an unbounded
recursion of breaks. Each job is now claimed before it is run. test_dev.ml
evaluates an expression that errors and resumes it, which fails against the
old shape.
Three things the first cut got wrong by being global when it had no business
being.
The modeline entry was added to `mode-line-misc-info' at load. It returns nil
outside a Flan buffer, so it was invisible — but it was still evaluated on
every redisplay of every buffer in the session, for someone who loads the
client and then spends the afternoon in dired. It is installed buffer-locally
by `flan-dev-setup' now, which already runs in exactly the buffers that want
it. The `derived-mode-p' guard stays: cheap, and it keeps the function honest
wherever it is called from.
`flan-dev-setup' switched eldoc on. Contributing a documentation source is
this file's business; whether eldoc runs at all is the user's, and turning it
on overrules someone who has `global-eldoc-mode' off deliberately. It is on by
default, so nearly everyone gets the same behaviour either way.
And a reconnect forgot the name cache without asking for it again. An empty
cache is honest but silent — eldoc goes quiet, M-. falls through to whatever
else is registered, and nothing says why — until the next install happens to
refill it. It refreshes straight after reconnecting, which is safe from there
because the connection is live by that point and the request does not come
back round through the same function.
All three want the same three facts about a name — what it is, what it looks
like, and where it was written — so the daemon answers all three in one
`defs` reply and the client keeps the last one.
`defs` is its own op rather than more fields on `describe`. `describe` is what
an editor *polls*: it is how the program's output gets drained, and the
existing tests ask it in loops. Signatures riding on that would be paid for
every time anyone glanced at the output buffer. This is asked once on connect
and again after each accepted install, which is exactly when the answer can
have changed — so a `defn` typed a second ago completes.
It is a cache rather than a request per keystroke because of where these are
called from: eldoc fires on an idle timer and completion inside redisplay, and
neither may block on a socket or signal.
Three refusals rather than three guesses. A global has no location because
`Tast.global` carries no `Loc`, and searching the buffer for "(defvar ticks"
instead would find the wrong one in a program of several files. The prelude is
a string inside the compiler, so its location names a file nobody can visit. A
short name that could be several of the program's package-qualified ones is
ambiguous, and picking would be a guess about which function you meant — a
name that is the tail of exactly *one* is not a guess, and resolves.
Functions the checker invented — a lifted handler-bind clause, which carries
an `fparent` — are left out entirely: nobody wrote that name, so completing it
is noise and jumping to it is meaningless.
And the daemon now makes its own source path absolute before building, because
every location it reports derives from it. `flan dev src/game.flan` from a
project root answered `src/game.flan:12:7`, which an editor can only resolve by
guessing what it was relative to.
lib/dev.ml is the only compiler file touched: a `defs` op, its three list
builders, and the one `realpath` in `start`. Nothing existing changed shape —
`describe`, `eval` and `eval-expr` answer byte for byte what they did.
An install that reports nothing is indistinguishable from one that failed
silently, which is the one thing this loop cannot afford: the whole promise is
that the running program now has the body you just wrote.
The names come from the reply rather than from what was typed, because the
daemon is the one that knows which of them it installed — a `defvar' the
program already had is not among them, and the reply already says so with
`:note'. That case now reads "nothing to install" instead of quoting a
build time for a build that did not happen. `:fns` and `:names' are reported
separately for the same reason: a buffer of five functions and two vars
should not report as five of anything.
A long list is counted and then sampled rather than truncated, since an echo
area cut off in the middle of the tenth name tells you neither how many there
were nor which.
And the region that was sent is flashed, which answers a question the echo
area cannot: `beginning-of-defun' may well have found a different form from
the one you thought point was in.
Whether a program is on the other end is the one fact worth a permanent place
on screen, because every command in the client is a lie without it. Until now
it was discovered by something failing, which is the worst moment to learn it.
Three states, not two. `off' is never connected; `lost' is a daemon that has
gone away, which is the ordinary case rather than an error — `flan dev' ends
when its program does, and a program under development exits all the time. So
`lost' is reconnected from, on the socket it was on, the next time anything is
sent.
The reconnect is strictly *before* a send and never after one. A connection
that dies mid-request might have died after the daemon took the request and
ran it; resending would install a definition twice, or evaluate a
side-effecting expression twice. That case now reports what happened and says
it was not resent, rather than silently doing it again.
A socket that is not there is refused by name with the path, and a deliberate
`flan-disconnect' forgets the socket, so the next command says "not connected"
instead of quietly reopening what was just closed.
An error that only reaches the echo area is gone the moment you type, and the
location was the useful half of it. So the client draws an overlay at the
`:loc` the daemon sent, with the message beside the code, and clears it the
next time that buffer's evaluation is accepted — a marker left behind after a
fix is a lie about the running program.
Two things had to be right first, and neither was.
The column in a `:loc` is a *byte* offset: lib/reader.ml walks the source a
byte at a time and OCaml strings are bytes. The old code did `forward-char`
with it, which is the same mistake as counting a frame's length in characters,
in a different place — one accented character earlier on the line puts the
marker as many columns to the right. It goes through `byte-to-position` from
the line's start now, and is clamped to the end of the line, which the old code
also needed: a column past a short line walked into the next one and pointed at
innocent code.
And the daemon numbers lines from the start of what it was *sent*, so `C-c C-c`
on a defn halfway down a buffer came back saying line 1. Every overlay would
have sat on the file's first line. The fix is leading newlines: the reader
skips them, and the reply's line numbers are then the buffer's own. No protocol
change, and nothing the daemon has to know.
Marking the error must not itself signal — the error the caller is owed is the
daemon's, and losing it to a bad location would report the wrong thing.
flan-repl.el is a comint buffer whose every line goes through the same
eval-expr request C-x C-e uses - no new protocol, no compiler support. Deriving
from comint rather than hand-rolling a prompt is the same call as deriving
flan-mode from lisp-mode: history, the input ring and kill/yank already exist
and are not worth rewriting. There is no subprocess behind it; the "process" is
a stub comint needs in order to have a prompt.
It is program-scoped: a name typed at the prompt resolves against the running
program's top-level namespace, so in sand you write sim/settle. A buffer
visiting a package's file gets the alias applied for it because the file says
which package it belongs to, and a prompt has no file to derive one from. RET
on a half-typed form opens a line instead of sending it, with balance checked
through the Flan syntax table so a paren inside a string does not count.
A value and the program's output are different things and arrive by different
routes: the value is the result of the request and appears at the prompt, while
anything printed rides along on the same reply into *flan-output*. Showing them
in one place would be convenient and wrong, so there is a test for the
separation - and it caught a real bug. The renderer's Unit case emitted () with
no evaluation at all, so (print-line "x"), the most ordinary thing anyone types
at a prompt, answered while nothing happened. A Unit expression is almost
always a call made for its effect; it is evaluated and then reported.
Its stdout is a pipe into the daemon now, and whatever it printed since the
last reply rides along with the next one into *flan-output*. Arriving with a
reply rather than by a separate request is the point: the output an evaluation
itself caused is the output anyone wants to see.
Draining that pipe is a liveness requirement, not a nicety. A pipe nobody reads
fills at 64K and the next write blocks the program forever, so it is read from
the accept loop's select whether or not an editor is asking, and the buffer is
capped - a program printing every frame must not grow the daemon without limit,
and the newest text is the useful end.
test_dev read the program's transcript off the daemon's stdout, which is no
longer where it goes; it collects :output from replies instead, which is also
what the editor does. The emacs test moved to a fixture that keeps running,
since it now evaluates more times than the old one had reloads to give.
A different primitive from redefining a name. There is no name to install a
body into, so the expression is wrapped in a function with nowhere to be called
from; the module exports flan_reload_call to say "run this once", and the agent
calls it after the install - on the game thread, at a frame boundary, so an
expression that reads the program's state sees a point the program agrees is
consistent.
Nothing is marshalled back because nothing could be. A Flan value carries no
header, so no code at run time can say what it is; the compiler knows the type
and renders it there, in the thunk. That is the layout decision's bill, and it
is why the printer set is the scalars rather than everything.
The rendering does not go through stdout. Stdout belongs to the program, it is
in the hot path for anything that prints, and a dev-only feature must not put a
branch in it - so flan_rt.c is untouched and the value goes to flan_dev_result,
read back over the agent's socket. Safe without a handshake because the
generation counter is bumped last: the daemon waits for it to move rather than
assuming the program has reached a frame boundary.
u64 refuses by name, because i64->bytes is signed and anything past 2^63 would
come back negative. Everything without a derived printer refuses the same way.
A number that is quietly wrong is the failure this whole thing exists to
prevent.
An evaluation is not a declaration: the thunk is built against the program and
never spliced into it, so describe does not fill up with an eval/N for every
expression ever typed.
The test that matters is the same expression twice. The fixture increments
ticks every frame, so two evaluations must disagree - a value computed in the
compiler, or read from a copy of the program's state, would not.
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.
C-c C-c recompiles the top-level form at point and installs it in a running
program at that program's next frame boundary. Verified against sand: an
unsaved buffer edit to game-draw, and 240 consecutive frames drew it.
flan-mode.el derives from prog-mode with lisp-mode's syntax table, which is
most of the work - Flan is s-expressions, so sexp motion, paren matching,
beginning-of-defun and indentation are already right. What it adds is Flan's
own brackets ([ and { are brackets and not symbol characters, since every
binding list and every type is written with them), the characters a name may
contain, and its keywords.
flan-dev.el has no parser in it, which is what the protocol choice bought:
prin1 writes a request, read reads a reply. C-c C-k sends a buffer as one
module rather than a form at a time, because a defvar and the function using it
have to arrive in the same load or the first refers to storage that does not
exist yet. An error comes back with a location and point moves there.
Framing is in bytes and Emacs counts characters, so every length goes through
string-bytes and the process is binary. Otherwise one non-ASCII character in a
buffer puts the reply stream out of step by exactly as many bytes as the
payload has of them - a bug that reads as a corrupt protocol and only appears
for some people. test_emacs.ml drives the real client against a real daemon for
that reason: it is not the same claim as the daemon answering correctly, and a
mistake in the framing, in beginning-of-defun over Flan's syntax table, or in
the reply reader passes test_dev.ml and fails here.
