The desktop soul (neuron/dist) compiles against the v1.0.0-20260501 release
runtime. After #66 landed the engram natives (tokenized/ranked search,
engram_prune_telemetry) and #79 the durable truncation fix into this runtime,
two gaps remained before it could cross-compile the Windows brain:
1. Windows OS boundary: the release runtime had no Win32 path. Ported the same
_WIN32-guarded shim the mainline runtime carries (#69): #ifdef _WIN32 ->
el_platform_win.h (winsock/dlsym/popen + WSAStartup ctor), SOCKET fd guards
and el_closesocket() at every socket site, CreateProcessA for exec_bg, the
tm_zone/mingw guard, an el_setsockopt optval wrapper (GCC14), and curl-less
libcurl stubs. Every change is _WIN32/HAVE_CURL-gated — the POSIX build is
byte-identical (gcc -fsyntax-only clean; native behaviour unchanged).
2. Header exports: the release el_runtime.h omitted symbols the soul dist calls
that are defined in this runtime's .c — the http_handler_fn/http_handler4_fn
typedefs and el_arena_push/pop, engram_prune_telemetry, engram_get_node_by_label.
Declaration-only, POSIX-neutral; fixes implicit-declaration/unknown-type
errors under the C11 mingw build.
Result: x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc compiles el_runtime.c + all 48 soul modules
clean; POSIX gcc -fsyntax-only clean. This is the Windows-port PR the runtime
needed on main (the release-runtime counterpart to #69), landed via stage.
The binary-safe fs_read length (_tl_fs_read_len) was consumed by the HTTP
response path for ANY body, even when a handler wrapped a smaller file into a
larger reply. Content-Length then lied AND the send stopped short: the
safety-contact (988) routes returned 178 of 208/218 bytes, cut mid-'set_at' —
unparseable JSON. The desktop app read that as failure. On Windows the shipped
brain is an OLD build without even the per-handler workaround, so EVERY reply
truncated: the app can't read confirmations and refuses the new user.
Durable fix: pair the length hint with the exact buffer pointer it describes
(_tl_fs_read_buf). Apply the raw byte count ONLY when the response IS that
buffer (binary file serving stays correct); every wrapped/enveloped/derived
body is measured with strlen. Reset both at request start and in fs_read /
json_get_raw. This also closes the stale-hint heap over-read (a length larger
than a later body would read past it out the socket) that a plain max() leaves
open — so this class of bug dies on every platform, not just where a handler
happened to be patched.
Applied identically to the mainline runtime (lang/el-compiler/runtime) AND the
frozen release runtime (lang/releases/v1.0.0-20260501) the desktop souls
compile against — the release copy still carried the raw leak, which is why the
Windows brain kept truncating. Same proven approach as PR #78 (Tim Lingo),
extended to cover the release runtime and rebased onto current main.
Both runtimes: gcc -fsyntax-only clean.
Durability: the 2026-07-21 fix stopped read routes writing the canonical
snapshot but left no save on ANY write path — every mutation lived in RAM
until a manual POST /api/save. Observed live: two restarts reverted the
store to a 17h-old snapshot, destroying same-day writes. persist_canonical()
now runs after node/edge create, knowledge capture, forget, strengthen, and
load-merge. ISE telemetry excluded deliberately (48h-pruned, loss-tolerant,
~2/min; snapshotting 28MB per heartbeat is waste).
Listing order: scan routes sort by salience with store-order ties, so
equal-salience telemetry (all ISEs are 0.3) returned OLDEST first — a
limited /api/nodes query silently returned a stale window, and a 41h-old
heartbeat series read as a live outage during this review. Ties now break
newest-first by created_at.
The old carry-over (weight *= 0.7 per engram_activate call) was call-rate-
dependent — carried context died in seconds under rapid curiosity scans and
lingered for hours under quiet loops — and a decayed scalar cannot represent
access frequency at all.
Now: k=10 access-timestamp ring + Petrov (2006) closed-form tail, d=0.5.
WM promotion and engram_strengthen record presentations; carry-over evicts
at base-level tau=-3.0 (Soar forgetting, ~403s single-touch) and shapes the
weight held at promotion (wm_anchor) with the ACT-R retrieval logistic
(s=0.4) — a pure function of wall-clock time, idempotent per call.
Persisted as access_ts/wm_anchor in snapshots; legacy nodes fall back to
the optimized form ln(n/(1-d)) - d*ln(L). base_level exposed in both node
serializers for observability.
Backing spec: 2026-07-21 integration brief (bl-b17facdd). Verified live:
carried weight ~anchor seconds after two disjoint activations (old code:
0.49x); frequency-hot nodes hold B=1.9 vs -0.14 single-touch.
Root cause of the 2026-05→07 identity-node loss: route_scan_edges and
route_sync serialized state by engram_save()ing over the canonical
snapshot.json on every GET, so one bad boot load meant the first read
request overwrote the good snapshot. Read routes now export to scratch
paths. Boot guard preserves evidence on non-empty-file/zero-node loads
and keeps a boot-time backup on good loads. New POST /api/load-merge
(explicit path required) used to restore 385 identity nodes + 1115
edges from the 2026-05-13 backup.
Three fixes that existed elsewhere but never reached the runtime the engram
binary actually builds against:
- tokenized + ranked query matching (search/search_json/activate seeds/
goal_bias) ported from the el-compiler copy (e3dabe3, 2026-07-14) — the
production engram kept whole-query Ctrl-F for 5 days after the fix
'shipped'. Multi-word curiosity seeds went 0 -> 36 activated. Kept the
ISE seed exclusion the el-compiler copy dropped.
- Knowledge -> 0.20 WM threshold after tier checks (dev-line 4bf7716):
Semantic/Episodic Knowledge nodes fell to the 0.40 note default and only
entered WM via breakthrough.
- goal_bias: Knowledge in is_knowledge + curiosity-seed technical terms
(dev-line d53516b).
Also: seed_epoch was a running pairwise average, not the mean it claimed —
exponentially over-weighted later seeds in the temporal-proximity bonus.
Fixed to a true int64-sum mean. Stale INHIBITION_FACTOR comment corrected.
Root cause captured as knowledge: two runtime copies + branch-per-fix
without merge discipline stranded the entire dev semantic layer (cosine
activation, embeddings) out of production. Reconciliation planned as P1.
1. engram_neighbors_json (release runtime): BFS frontier/visited strings were
el_strdup'd (arena-tracked) but manually freed, so el_request_end()
double-freed every one — SIGABRT in http_worker under load (2 prod crashes
today via /api/neuron/session/begin and /api/neuron/graph; reproduced and
verified fixed with ASAN). Introduced when porting from the dev runtime,
which correctly uses plain strdup. Third instance of the
arena-vs-manual-free class (after EngramNode 07-15 and idmap keys 07-16).
2. server.el: let-in-if scoping sweep — defaults assigned inside if-blocks
never mutated the outer binding, so /api/search and /api/activate always
ran with q="", created nodes got node_type=""/salience=0.0, edges got
relation=""/weight=0.0, and save/load with no path hit engram_save("").
Rewritten to the let-if-else expression form. /api/activate now also
rejects empty queries instead of wiping carried WM weights.
3. engram_activate: retrieval reinforcement (ACT-R base-level learning) —
nodes promoted to WM that survive both capacity caps now get
last_activated/activation_count updated, so frequently retrieved memories
decay slower than abandoned ones. Scoped to promoted-only to avoid
flattening dampening across BFS fan-out.
will.anderson