runtime: allocation accounting — the deterministic signal for complexity gating
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (pull_request) Failing after 12m7s

Implements the three primitives the test-framework design (DESIGN.md §6.5)
requires for gating on growth curves: el_alloc_count, el_alloc_bytes,
el_peak_rss. Registered in codegen's builtin_arity and wrapped in el_seed.c per
the project's C-builtin recipe.

WHY COUNTS AND NOT WALL-CLOCK: a growth-curve gate has to be a hard build
failure, which means the signal cannot flake. Wall-clock needs warmup,
statistics, and a quiet machine; on shared CI it is unusable as a gate.
Allocation counts are perfectly deterministic — same input, same number, every
machine, every run. Fit them against n and a complexity regression becomes a
build failure with zero noise.

All four runtime string allocators (el_strdup, el_strbuf, and their _persist
variants) funnel every allocation the language performs, so instrumenting there
counts everything.

WHY BYTES AS WELL AS COUNT — this is not redundancy, it is the whole gate.
Measured with two El programs, one allocating once per item, one rebuilding its
accumulator each iteration:

    n     linear allocs / bytes      quadratic allocs / bytes
    100        100 /    290               100 /   5,150
    200        200 /    690               200 /  20,300
    400        400 /  1,490               400 /  80,600
    800        800 /  3,090               800 / 321,200

The quadratic program's allocation COUNT is exactly linear — identical to the
healthy one. Counting allocations alone would have missed it completely. Bytes
catch it: each doubling of n quadruples bytes (ratios 3.94, 3.97, 3.99 ->
converging on 4.0, i.e. O(n^2)), while the linear case converges on 2.0.

That shape — count linear, per-allocation size growing — is the classic
accidental quadratic, and it is exactly elc's defect: quadratic allocation
VOLUME, which the old shipped compiler paid in RSS (27 GB, OOM) and the rebuilt
one pays in malloc/free churn (42s on 1.4 MB). Volume was the invariant across
both; RSS and wall-clock were just the two ways it surfaced.

el_peak_rss is exported for context and is explicitly NOT a gating signal — it
is perturbed by allocator internals, the page cache, and the OS. Gate on the
deterministic numbers; report the physical one.

Counters are unsynchronised by design: this is measurement, and a lock would
change the thing being measured. Exact on the single-threaded compile path,
approximate under threads.
This commit is contained in:
bigmerge
2026-08-15 21:21:42 -05:00
parent 2240d26c32
commit 37bcf7eb74
4 changed files with 87 additions and 2 deletions
+6
View File
@@ -2766,6 +2766,9 @@ fn builtin_arity(name: String) -> Int {
if str_eq(name, "__engram_scan_nodes_json") { return 2 }
if str_eq(name, "__engram_edges_json") { return 2 }
if str_eq(name, "__engram_pool_stats_json") { return 0 }
if str_eq(name, "__el_alloc_count") { return 0 }
if str_eq(name, "__el_alloc_bytes") { return 0 }
if str_eq(name, "__el_peak_rss") { return 0 }
if str_eq(name, "__generate") { return 1 }
// Filesystem
if str_eq(name, "fs_read") { return 1 }
@@ -2866,6 +2869,9 @@ fn builtin_arity(name: String) -> Int {
if str_eq(name, "engram_scan_nodes_json") { return 2 }
if str_eq(name, "engram_edges_json") { return 2 }
if str_eq(name, "engram_pool_stats_json") { return 0 }
if str_eq(name, "el_alloc_count") { return 0 }
if str_eq(name, "el_alloc_bytes") { return 0 }
if str_eq(name, "el_peak_rss") { return 0 }
if str_eq(name, "engram_neighbors_json") { return 3 }
if str_eq(name, "engram_activate_json") { return 2 }
if str_eq(name, "engram_stats_json") { return 0 }