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 constructor in the agent package binds FLAN_AGENT_SOCKET when it is set,
which is the daemon and nothing else — both shapes set it, before the fork in
--two-process and before the exec in the merged build. So a program under
[flan dev] that calls (agent/poll) and has no (agent/start) in it takes
redefinitions anyway, and one that does call start meets an agent that is
already listening and gets a no-op.
The window this closes was the complaint in DISCUSS.org: a program that opens
a window before starting its agent leaves the daemon waiting on a socket that
does not exist yet. Bound here, the socket exists before main whatever the
program does afterwards — so test_dev.ml's late-agent row asserts the negation
of what it used to. The delivery sent during the sleep no longer carries "the
program has not called (agent/start ...) yet", because that is no longer true
of it; what is still late, and still asserted, is the poll that installs it.
It reaches exactly as far as the linker does. Reach prunes a package nothing
calls into, so a program that mentions the agent nowhere does not link this
file and has no constructor to run: auto-start is for a program that polls and
has dropped its start call, not for one that says nothing about the agent at
all. That limit and the release-build residual are in FIX.org, along with the
daemon branch that can no longer be reached.
agent-nostart.flan is the pin, and its two numbers are the honest ones: 1
before anything could arrive, 1000 after the wait, because a listener bound
before main is still not an install.
