web/examples/check.sh was failing, and had been since 2026-09-12. printing.out
records the structural printer's output with colon field labels; the printer emits
dots. The language is right and the recording is stale -- the colon-to-dot sweep
worked on Flan source forms and never touched a .out file, and check.sh is not
part of dune test, so nothing has run it since the day both landed. The acceptance
suite settles which side is correct: it expects the dot spelling everywhere and is
green. The page quoted the same stale line.
The x86 paragraph told a reader that conditions are the visible gap and quoted a
build failing by name. That exact command now succeeds and produces a binary:
conditions, guards, cells, redefinition modules and DWARF all landed, the survey
is 103 MATCH / 0 DIFFER / 0 refused, and what is still refused is narrow enough to
name -- an aggregate crossing the C boundary, which is the classifier this backend
exists not to have.
ArithError was absent from the page entirely. It sits beside the bounds section
because it is the same decision twice, including the part where no restart is
established at the failing operation. Its two programs are in web/examples/ and
checked, which is the page's own rule for anything it quotes.
BUILT.md appends and never dates, so a paragraph that was true when it was
written reads as fact forever. Two are not: the map type spelling is (Map K V)
and braces in type position are refused by name, and sand.flan has not called
load-texture since it was cut back to port parity. Both get the parenthetical
the FLAN_RAYLIB_H paragraph already got rather than an edit, since that is the
convention the file has.
SPIKE-GENERICS.md gets the treatment overview.md has: a header saying what it is
and when it stopped being current. Its body stays. The two things in it that
would now mislead are named there -- its account of what plan.org says, which
plan.org has since overtaken, and the bare-t-at-every-use rule, which is narrower
than what shipped, since (Option t) does not compile.
NEXT.md prepends, so its second section still opened with "Read this first" while
pinning a tree six lanes behind and listing as live a queue most of which has
landed. It keeps its contents; what it gains is the sentence saying when it
stopped being where the tree is, and the survey count it quotes measured again on
this tree -- 103 MATCH, 0 DIFFER, 38 skipped.
The two generics entries get the file's own strikethrough treatment, which their
siblings already had: the {K V} catch resolved exactly as it predicted it would,
and there are five predicates rather than four.
Also here: conditions.org gains ArithError beside BoundsError, with the split
between the two runtime conditions that offer retry and the two that deliberately
offer nothing; and tast.ml's header stops naming a tree-walking interpreter among
the backends that consume the typed IR.
handler-bind takes (Type [name] body ...) and has since it was written; the
sketch paired a type with an fn, which is the shape parse.ml names in its own
refusal message. load-level had two return types. And there is no defcondition
anywhere in the tree -- a condition type is an ordinary struct, which is what
both spec-conditions.md and conditions.org say, so the one form in this file that
introduced one was inventing it.
The header's rules went with them: lowercase-is-a-type-variable and "no sigils"
are both the pre-$t spelling, and let never took an annotation.
Every generic example in syntax-sketch.flan was written in the lowercase-variable
spelling that $t replaced, so the file whose job is to be copied from was the one
place the wrong spelling cost the most. Checking the replacements against the
compiler rather than against the sketch turned up three more, and each is now
either fixed or named:
- reduce is (reduce s init f) and its accumulator is the element type. The old
argument order was Clojure's and the fold in centroid is not a shape it has.
- an fn cannot be written inline into a (Fn [$t $t] bool) parameter, because a
generic body is checked with nothing substituted and the fn has no types to
take. Inside a generic the callback is a named defn.
- (largest hps >) does not work and never did: an operator is not a name. Both
this file and spec-memory.md asserted it.
centroid is left as it was, because component-wise arithmetic over a fixed array
is planned rather than built and an aspirational example is not a defect -- but
it now says so instead of leaving it to be found.
spec-memory.md's generics section still said there were no constraints and wrote
its type variable as a bare lowercase name, which is the spelling the $t sigil
replaced -- the largest example in it would not have compiled. The where clause
and the five predicates are plan.org's account and this now agrees with it rather
than contradicting it. The empty-map example named no types and used defvar,
neither of which is how map-new is called.
spec-conditions.md named BoundsError once and nothing else. The four conditions
the runtime signals, and the split between the two that establish a retry and the
two that deliberately establish nothing, belong in \xc2\xa75 because that is the section
whose account of restarts the split could have falsified. It does not: the rule is
that the restart a bad index wants is the one the program already had.
The Compilation section was written around a permanent tree-walking backend for
expression eval. Open decision #7 closed the other way and BUILT.md records it:
compiling is the only way a form is ever run. The diagram, the milestone-2 exit
criterion, milestone 7's "free in the interpreter", the dev/release table and
the decision itself all said otherwise, and lib/expand.ml states the settled
answer at the top of the file.
Also here, because the same section was the place they were missing: the
hand-written x86-64 code generator, which is a second route from the typed IR to
the same observable behaviour rather than a second semantics; DWARF from both
code generators rather than from LLVM alone; OCaml as a settled host language;
and the map-new example, which has named its key and value types since braces
stopped being a type spelling.
flan..init-globals and the C main shim sit inside the compile unit's range
and have no line-table sequence. The worry is that a debugger picks a row
out of a neighbouring function's sequence and reports a confident wrong
Flan line; it does not. Checked by breaking inside dev-globals.flan's
initialiser: the frame is named from the ELF symbol, the line is honestly
absent, and the unwind out to libc is the .cfi working.
So that handoff item is a gap and not a wrong answer, which is worth the
distinction because the two deserve different urgency.
101 MATCH rather than 99, and neither number is this lane's doing -- that
lane added two probes to spike/x86. Zero DIFFER, zero REFUSED, zero NOX86
on both sides, the skip breakdown unmoved, cells 4/4, dune test exit 0 with
232 checks and no failures.
The baseline rows, the twelve-program DWARF sweep re-run against the code
that was actually committed rather than a superseded version of it, the
lldb transcript, the unwind out of flan_bounds_error, and the compile
unit's range checked against nm rather than asserted.
test_acceptance.ml's lldb case is the only part of the suite that says a
person can debug a Flan program: a breakpoint on a Flan name, a backtrace
with .flan files and lines, and locals with their own types. It ran against
the LLVM backend only.
An --x86 arm, with a narrower claim: the breakpoint and the backtrace, and
that the program still prints what it printed. No frame variable, because
x86.ml emits no DW_TAG_variable -- a slot there is a bump-allocated frame
temporary whose lifetime the backend does not model. That gap between the
two backends is now recorded in the place it will be read.
Worth pinning rather than leaving to a handoff, because everything it
exercises is bytes x86.ml wrote by hand -- a line program, a compile unit,
an abbreviation table -- and a wrong byte in any of them is silent.
debug_compile grows an ~x86 flag beside the ~dev one it already had.
The debug-information section added in the last commit is about what GAS
gets wrong against a file with no instructions in it: .loc is flushed when
an instruction is assembled, and this backend assembles none. CFI is the
opposite case and worth recording beside it. Its advances come from frag
positions, so .cfi_def_cfa_offset interleaved with .byte comes out exact --
measured, readelf --debug-dump=frames on a .byte-only function gives the
right advances.
The content is a constant, and that is the header's claim about the frame
model paying for itself. rsp is written exactly twice, so: on entry the CFA
is rsp+8; push rbp makes it rsp+16 with the saved rbp at cfa-16; mov rsp,rbp
moves the rule onto rbp and it stays there for the whole body; after leave
rsp is rbp+8 and the CFA is rsp+8 again. Five directives, three sites --
emit_fn, emit_main and emit_globals_init, which have the same prologue.
emit_main has no closing rule because it has no epilogue: it leaves through
flan_exit and the ud2 after that is unreachable, so the rbp rule holds to
the last byte, which is what a backtrace out of anything main called wants.
gdb did not need this -- its prologue analyser already unwound out of
flan_bounds_error into flan.main with a line number, because push rbp;
mov rbp,rsp; sub rsp,N is the pattern it recognises. It is here because the
description is now stated rather than guessed, and because a break at the
very first byte of a function -- before the push -- now unwinds from a rule
rather than from a heuristic.
Gated on --debug so a release build's assembly stays byte-for-byte what it
was. That is conservative rather than principled: the description is correct
in every build and a release build is where a crash would most want it. What
stops it being unconditional is only that nothing measures the .eh_frame it
would add, and another lane is measuring backend cost right now.
--x86 --debug was refused in build.ml for want of DWARF. It emits it now:
a compile unit, a subprogram per function, and a line table, so gdb breaks
by Flan file and line and a backtrace names Flan source.
The reason it is written as data rather than as .loc directives is the
finding worth carrying forward, and HANDOFF-x86-debug.md leads with it.
GAS builds its line table out of dwarf2_emit_insn, which runs only when an
instruction is assembled, and this backend assembles none -- everything is
a .byte blob. A pending .loc therefore sits until the next .loc and is
flushed at whatever the location counter has reached by then: every row
comes out one statement late and the last statement of every function gets
no row at all. Measured on GAS 2.44, and interposing labels does not help.
So .debug_line is emitted here the way the instructions are. Every row is
a full DW_LNE_set_address on a label rather than an advance_pc with a
computed delta, because a delta would be a difference of two labels inside
a .uleb128 -- a value whose size changes the offsets after it, and whose
failure would look exactly like a DWARF bug.
The .file 1 directive at the top of the assembly is not about our table at
all: without it clang's integrated assembler generates a compile unit of
its own over the .s, whose rows land at the call mnemonics, and those
addresses are inside the functions we already describe. -gdwarf-4 goes
with it so the empty stub it leaves behind parses.
Rows are deduplicated on the byte counter as well as on the position.
lower recurses, so an outer form and the inner one that emits its first
byte both ask for a row at the same address; keeping the first is smaller
and is the better answer, since a debugger takes the last of a run. buf.n
already existed and was written but never read. This is its first reader.
No locals and no types, deliberately. A slot here is a bump-allocated
frame temporary whose offset is known but whose lifetime is not modelled
-- scoped reclaims temporaries and a later expression reuses the bytes --
so a DW_TAG_variable would be right at some addresses and confidently
wrong at others. That is the call build.ml already makes about wasm32's
member offsets.
Verified under gdb against test/programs/debug.flan, and against an LLVM
--debug build of the same program. Identical bar the parameter values,
which is the locals work. Transcript in the handoff.
emit.ml:1918 drops the allocation registry's notes in a release build --
the checker builds a Tast.Rt it cannot know is unwanted, because it does
not know whether this is a dev build. The x86 backend had no counterpart
and emitted the calls for real: correct, since the registry answers
nothing when it is disabled, but one call per container operation into a
function that returns immediately.
The guard is emit.ml's byte for byte, strict > 17 included: bare
flan_dev_reg_note is the runtime's own C entry point and is never a
Tast.Rt, and what check.ml builds is the _vec, _map and _pool wrappers.
emit.ml drops the note before the arguments are walked so that taking the
address of the container does not leave an escaped alloca behind; here the
arguments are not touched until call_rt, so answering () is already early
enough.
Measured, call sites of flan_dev_reg_note in the disassembly:
vec.flan 46 -> 1 (--dev: 46)
maps.flan 55 -> 1 (--dev: 55)
registry.flan 36 -> 1 (--dev: 36)
The one left in each is not emitted code -- it is inside the runtime's own
flan_dev_reg_note_vec. An LLVM release build of vec.flan has the same one,
so the two backends now agree.
HANDOFF-x86-debug.md is the stub for item 6, which is next, and it leads
with the finding that changes that item's plan: .loc does not work against
a backend that emits .byte blobs, so the line table has to be written out
by hand.
