The prelude's own (vec-new Form) was refused with "nothing here says what
(vec-new) is a Vec of" -- a message about a missing annotation, to a program
that had written one. The build went red the moment the Form declaration was
checked against anything, which is why the front half landed unmeasured.
The test a leading bare symbol has to pass was spelled out twice, once in
vec_new_elem and once in map_new_types, and both lists were written before
unions existed: primitives, structs, enums, aliases. resolve_name has known
about unions since they landed, so the two halves disagreed about what a type
name is. Now there is one list, read by both, so the next kind of type cannot
be added to one of them.
The case is in unions.flan rather than in a file of its own, because what it
asserts is that a union is an element type like any other -- (vec-new Shape),
(map-new string Shape) -- and that is a sentence about unions.
Also drops forms.so, a build artefact the last lane committed.
check_finite already walked a union's cases, so a union containing itself by
value was refused before the emitter could try to lay it out -- which it would
have done forever, since payload_lay calls lay calls payload_lay. Asserted
both ways round: directly, and two unions through each other.
Through a pointer it works, and that is the shape a Form has, so it is in the
program rather than only in the prose: a Tree with a (Ptr Tree) field, matched
through a deref, summed recursively.
BUILT.md also records why match's fall-through is still unreachable rather
than a trap. It is only sound because no reachable program can hold a tag no
case names: Zero is tag 0, every construction writes a tag the checker
resolved, and uninit -- the one way to get bytes nobody wrote -- is refused on
a union for exactly this reason. The refusal is what pays for the unreachable.
print, the REPL inspector and the break buffer's locals all walk a concrete
type through render.ml, and a union fell through its Named arm to <Shape>.
It now recovers the case from the tag by a chain of comparisons -- the same
shape the enum arm already had, and for the same reason: the name is erased
before any backend sees it -- and reads the fields of that case only. Reading
the others would be reading a payload that is not there.
It prints (Shape.Dot {.x 1.5 .y -2.5}), which is what the source would write.
The union table has to reach the walk, so Render.ctx grew a field and its
three construction sites in session.ml and one in check.ml pass it. That is
the whole of the session.ml change.
test/programs/unions.flan is the program: a case with no fields, a case wider
than another, a case holding a string, a union in a struct, a union through a
call in both directions, ZII, reassignment, and printing. Its layout was
checked against clang's for the same declaration -- 32 bytes aligned 8 with
the payload at offset 8, and 40/8 for the struct holding it.
