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.
Another lane landed (slice-from-ptr p n) while this backend was not looking,
and it arrived as two refusals rather than one: slice-from-ptr.flan and
bounds.flan both stopped building through --x86. Neither is a new obstacle —
a Slice _ is {ptr, i64} here exactly as it is in emit.ml, so the form is one
store of the pointer and one of the length and no new representation at all.
The half worth writing down is the check. There is nothing to compare the
length against — only the caller knows how many elements live behind that
pointer — so what is checked is that the promise is not absurd, and that test
is *signed*. check_slice's own compares are unsigned, and a negative i32
sign-extended to 64 bits is a huge unsigned value that an unsigned "hi <= len"
waves through; the result would be a slice about 2^64 long that reads as a
pass and faults somewhere else entirely.
Nothing in the corpus walks that path: every length in slice-from-ptr.flan is
a literal, and a negative literal is refused by check.ml before any code is
emitted. So spike/x86/p7-slice-from-ptr.flan takes the length as a parameter
and runs it through a restart-case, which puts the condition's low/high/length
on stdout and compares them against the LLVM build.
