Joseph Ferano 63d9b87b7a Conditions on the x86 backend, and bounds checks with them
The transfer channel was the only thing between 41 programs and the
corpus. It is there now: a guard after every Flan call, a landing pad
per restart-case, handler-bind and with-allocator, a transfer exit per
function that runs its fdefers, and check_at and check_slice, which
could not exist until the guard did.

Measured by what the programs print and what they exit with, never by
reading bytes. spike/x86/survey.sh builds every program in
test/programs both ways and diffs stdout and the exit status; it did
not exist, so it is here too, and it is the progress meter.

  before  41 MATCH   1 DIFFER  41 refused by name
  after   83 MATCH   0 DIFFER   0 refused by name

The one DIFFER was bounds.flan, and it was the honest answer to
"--x86 is silently a --no-bounds-checks build". It is not one any
more: check_at and check_slice signal through the channel exactly as
emit.ml's do, so a bounds violation signals, a restart-case catches
it, and an unhandled one exits 134 on both backends. The transitional
refusal that would have said so retired before it was written.

check_no_transfer is not removed, it is narrowed to the one place the
argument still holds: a global's initialiser runs from
flan..init-globals, before main and before anything can handle
anything, so a transfer out of it has nowhere to go.

Four bugs, and three of them are the shape item 16 predicted -- code
that reads correctly and answers wrong, found by output and not by
objdump:

- The body fell through into the transfer exit, so every fdefer ran
  twice on a normal return. emit.ml cannot have this bug: its ret
  terminates the block.
- A Vec crossed to the runtime as the address of a *copy*, so pushes
  grew the copy and an in-bounds (at v 1) signalled against a length
  of zero.
- ucomis sets CF, ZF and PF together for a NaN, so sete answered true
  for (= x x) and the prelude's NaN test never fired: (/ 0.0 0.0)
  formatted as -9223372036854775808. Flan's comparisons are LLVM's
  ordered ones, so < and <= swap and =, != take a setnp beside them.
- A union read field 0 through the struct table and was refused by
  name rather than laid out as a tag and a payload.

And one that could not have been found later: emit_globals_init stored
a null *into* the channel slot rather than a cell address into it,
which is a null pointer for every callee to write through. Harmless
while nothing could transfer; a fault the first time a guard loaded
through it.
2026-09-13 18:05:08 +07:00
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2026-09-10 17:27:53 +07:00