flan/DISCUSS.md

Let's discuss

Open questions, raised and deliberately not answered yet. Nothing here is a decision or a task. Each entry is the question as asked, plus what is already known in this repo that bears on it — so the investigation starts from what exists rather than from scratch.

Settled decisions live in NEXT.md. Reasons for what already exists live in BUILT.md.

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1. i, the inspector, and the frame it cannot see

Two things got conflated here and they should be separated.

What the inspector already does. Most of what was asked for is built. flan-inspect opens its own buffer, lays a value's fields one per line, RET walks into one, l comes back, g re-reads. The renderer bounds its walk at depth 4 and span 8, and entering a field renders that field from depth 0 — so the elision moves with you rather than truncating permanently. It is CIDER's inspector adapted, and the file says what the adaptation changed.

What is actually missing is detail on the leaves: a number shows in decimal only, with no hex and no binary, and a pointer does not show its address. Purely additive, small, and worth doing.

The real problem, and it is sharper than "a bug". The locals listing renders from each frame's own slot addresses, so it is frame-accurate. The inspector is built on a stack of expressions — going into a field means sending a different expression ((.pos b) where the last was b), and l works by popping back to the previous one. That design is forced: a Flan value has no header, the thunk that rendered it is dlclosed as soon as it returns, and there is no heap to retain anything in, so nothing can be held server-side the way CIDER holds a JVM object.

The consequence is that i evaluates a name wherever the evaluator stands, not in the frame being looked at. On the innermost frame that happens to be right. On any other it may resolve to a global, to a different binding, or fail — with nothing saying so.

An earlier suggestion in this conversation — "root the inspector at the slot's address" — does not work, and the reason is worth keeping: an address is not an expression, so the first RET has nothing to build the next expression from and navigation dies at step one. Recorded because it is the obvious fix and it is wrong.

So the options are genuinely three, and none is free:

1. Teach the program to evaluate an expression relative to a frame. The most useful and the most work: the frame's slots would have to be in scope for a compiled thunk, which means the daemon building a thunk whose free names bind to that frame's addresses. It would also fix C-x C-e while stopped, which has the same blindness.
2. Give the inspector a second rooting mode — an address root that can still walk, by carrying a type alongside the address and stepping to a field's address rather than to a sub-expression. Navigation then works, but the two modes have different capabilities and l has to cross between them.
3. Refuse i outside the innermost frame, honestly and by name. Cheapest, and it gives up the feature exactly where it is most wanted, since the innermost frame is the one already fully visible.

2. Annotating the IR and the disassembly with the source

The IR half is nearly free and should just be done. emit.ml writes .ll as text, so a comment costs nothing and cannot break anything, and every typed IR node already carries a Loc.t.

The disassembly half, with the optimisation question settled. objdump already interleaves source into a listing when DWARF is present (-S), and the daemon already shells out to objdump — so the -O0 case is close to a flag.

Settled in conversation: -O0 is expected to follow the source and gets the full annotation; -O2 is not expected to and gets either nothing or whatever best-effort mapping falls out. That removes what looked like the blocking question. --debug forcing -O0 is therefore fine and does not need decoupling for this.

How SBCL does it, since it came up. SBCL does not shell out. sb-disassem is its own disassembler, written in Lisp, that knows the instruction encodings directly. What that buys is annotation from the inside: it labels constants the function references, names the functions being called, marks entry points, and shows its own calling conventions — because it compiled the code object and still holds the metadata.

The relevant observation is that this project is closer to SBCL's position than the objdump route suggests. The daemon owns the build and holds the metadata too; it simply is not feeding much of it into the listing yet. Naming the function behind an indirection cell, or a constant by its source name, needs no instruction decoder — only the information the daemon already has. Writing a disassembler is not the interesting part and should stay off the table; richer annotation of objdump's output is cheap and is where SBCL's advantage actually comes from.

3. def, defvar, defconst

There is no def. There is defvar (mutable global) and defconst (compile-time constant, folded).

The proposal: a def that is mutable, where defvar only rewrites the value if the variable is new — Common Lisp's actual defvar semantics, where re-evaluating a defvar deliberately does not clobber a value you have been building up at runtime. That distinction matters much more here than in most languages, because C-c C-k on a whole buffer re-evaluates every top-level form against a running program, and today that resets state you may have spent a session accumulating.

defconst under redefinition is the unclear one, as noted — it is folded into its use sites, so changing one is closer to a recompile than to an assignment.

4. Structural typing, row polymorphism, anonymous structs

Worth noting before this is scoped: types.ml already does structural equality on resolved types, and a Flan struct is exactly its C layout with no header or tag word. So the representation is already structural; what is nominal is the checking, not the data.

The questions this opens: whether a function can take "any struct with an x and a y"; whether anonymous structs get a spelling; how this interacts with the FFI, where the shim generates a C typedef per named struct; and how it interacts with the planned managed classes, which are explicitly the opposite direction — identity and metadata rather than plain layout.

5. A performant JS transpiler

Asked as a feasibility question. Bear in mind the web target already exists and ships real machine code via wasm, so this is not the only route to a browser and the case for it needs stating: smaller artifacts, no wasm toolchain, debuggability in browser devtools, or something else.

The hard parts are the ones the wasm target got for free from clang: the memory model (Flan is pointers and explicit layout; JS is not), the FFI, and the fact that the whole raylib layer is C. A JS backend that cannot run raylib is a different product from the one that can.

6. C interop as seamless as Zig's

Today: declare-c names one C function per line, and the compiler generates the wrapper, the typedefs and the flattened declaration. 175 of them for raylib. No header is ever read, deliberately — which means nothing can check that a declaration matches the real signature, and that is written down as trusted rather than guaranteed.

The proposal is to read the header, prefix a namespace, and get rl/InitWindow for free — plus possibly automatic kebab-casing to rl/init-window.

This is a large change in kind, not just in size: it means a C parser or a libclang dependency in the build, and it trades an explicit, checkable list for an implicit surface. Worth weighing against what declare-c already buys, which is that a binding is one line and the wrapper is generated. The auto-kebab-case question is separable and much smaller — and note the FFI currently keeps C's own spelling on purpose, so the mapping would need to be reversible.

7. Where defclass stands

Specified in plan.org and deliberately not started — its own last line says nothing happens until ordinary struct, Handle and reload semantics work. Those have largely landed since that was written, so the gate may be closer than the document assumes.

What it is meant to add: identity, runtime shape metadata, an implementation-defined representation, generic-function dispatch, and live schema change with an explicit migration at a frame boundary — which is the answer to the one thing redefinition still cannot do, changing a struct's layout while instances exist.

Three findings from an earlier review, recorded in NEXT.md and not yet in plan.org:

• A generic function is a cell. Adding a method from a later module is the same problem indirection cells already solve, so the expensive half is built and tested.
• The pool is not one storage option among three. migrate-instances has to enumerate live instances, which a pool behind a generational Handle gives by construction and the other two options do not.
• Every layout version must stay resolvable for as long as any instance holds it — the same rule as "nothing is ever dlclosed".

Also open and related: whether a condition can be a class, which decides whether handler matching has one path or two. NEXT.md records the argument; decision 4 there took the cheaper parent-link route for now and explicitly left real inheritance possible later.

8. Watching variables

Raised while designing item 1, and deliberately separated from it.

Item 1 shows globals per frame, chosen by what the code in that frame references. That is the right default and it cannot cover the case where the thing you care about is not named by the frame you are standing in — stopped deep in a helper, still wanting to see the grid.

So: a way to say "always show me this", surviving a resume and the next break.

Questions it opens:

• What can be watched. A global is easy — it has a name and an address that does not move. A local is harder: it belongs to a frame that is gone as soon as you resume, so "watch y" either means a different y every time or means nothing. A watched expression — (at velocity 40 12) — is the most useful and the most expensive, since it has to be compiled and run in the program each time, which is what eval-expr already does.
• Where the list lives. Per project, per session, or in the file. A watch list that vanishes when Emacs restarts is one you stop using; one in the repo is one you accidentally commit.
• When it updates. Only on entering a break is cheap and probably enough. Live-updating while the program runs is a different feature — closer to a HUD than a debugger — and worth not conflating.
• Whether it belongs in the break buffer at all, or in its own window that is useful while the program is running, which is arguably where a game developer wants it.