Files
el/docs/v1/experiments/cycles/07-invocation-is-not-composable.md
T
bigmerge c6ba0677f0 log v1 experiments: nineteen cycles, organised by the method that produced them
cycles/    one file per Ishikawa -> scientific method -> Six Sigma loop, named
           for the DEFECT not the fix, carrying the commit record as written at
           the time
findings/  what the cycles produced, cross-cut: live bugs, architecture answers,
           and defects in my own measurement

The organising finding is that predictions which came back FALSE produced every
significant result. Eleven of sixty-one failed, and those eleven found: that the
arity table was not drifted but 40% incomplete; that the AST traversal is
irreducible and only rules and judgments move; that guards could refuse through
the seam after all; and that routing el_bin_lookup through the gate did NOT fix
the SIGSEGV, because the fallback strlen was the hazard -- a wrong fix I would
otherwise have shipped as verified.

One cycle was run without committing predictions first and had to be discarded
as rigged. It is kept, in full, as 18-async-half-expressible.md.
2026-08-17 10:52:17 -05:00

1.9 KiB

invocation is not composable

One Ishikawa → scientific method → Six Sigma loop. The record below is the commit message as written at the time, before the outcome was known to anyone reading this file.

Record — bc2f26d

EXPERIMENT: invocation control resolves at runtime

ISHIKAWA: why did wraps_body need compile-time knowledge? Because the wrapper
called the target directly. If the wrapper calls through the seam instead, the
seam can call the body itself, and a construct bound after the build decides
how and whether to invoke it.

PREDICTIONS AND RESULTS
  P1 wrap becomes runtime-bindable                  TRUE   body x3 -> 21,
                                                           never invoked -> 111
  P2 codegen shrinks                                TRUE   5042 -> 4977
  P3 cost 5-10% from an indirect call on every fn   TRUE   0.36s -> 0.39s, ~8%
  P4 zero-param fns break on the empty struct       TRUE   empty struct is a GNU
                                                           extension, empty init
                                                           is C23. Fixed with a
                                                           char field.
  P5 fixpoint holds                                 TRUE

PROCESS FAILURE worth recording: my first patch silently did not apply because
I dropped the assert on the string replacement. The build then failed with
"undeclared identifier __thunk_noargs", which I nearly attributed to the
empty-struct prediction. The guard that would have caught it existed and I
removed it -- the same shape as every other defect found tonight.

Removed: declare_wrap, decorator_wrap, cg_wrap_target, cg_wrap_construct,
params_to_call_args, and the wraps_body scanner branch.

prohibits_outside is now the ONLY construct kind left at compile time, and it
cannot move: a #error has no runtime.

Record — c04d68f

land runtime invocation control: only prohibition remains compiled