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superseded rather than built, and macro-expansion source locations are on an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.
Item 12 asks five questions and says to answer them with a spike rather than a
rewrite. spike/embed/ is that spike: one script, six binaries, each one built to
fail loudly at the thing it is asking about. It is deliberately not a dune
target -- the root dune only excludes old-ocaml/, so a dune file here would land
in @default and make the spike part of the build. It drives ocamlfind and clang
by hand against the flan.cmxa dune already produces.
The probes, in the order they would kill the idea: the smallest possible link, a
C main() reaching one OCaml function; the whole compiler linked in and doing
real work; the same again with lib/dynload_stubs.c from the unmerged dlopen
branch, because that is the only C the compiler itself is built from; the game
keeping the main thread while caml_startup happens on a pthread beside it; the
SIGSEGV disposition read on both sides of caml_startup; and an 8 MiB arena
checked byte for byte across a compaction.
No result is written down yet. This is the apparatus.
