shoney.arickathil
a3a642b8bb
- developer move; all inbound links repointed (root docs, plan/, plan/compiler/, exploration, superpowers plans+specs, in-progress marker), board's own links re-based one level deeper - prose mentions inside landed plans left as historical records Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
89 lines
7.2 KiB
Markdown
89 lines
7.2 KiB
Markdown
# Code Review: log-watcher Compilation Requirements
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This document was a gap analysis of what the `woc` front end needs before the
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log-watcher sample compiles. Its findings were extracted on 2026-08-10 into
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[`superpowers/specs/2026-08-10-logwatcher-gap-closure-design.md`](superpowers/specs/2026-08-10-logwatcher-gap-closure-design.md)
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and the plans it amends; its Phase 1–4 roadmap is retired in favour of the
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approved story iterations. See [`00-status.md`](stories/00-status.md) for current
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status.
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## Standing critique (undated, author unrecorded)
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Native speed — the big one. Everything is interpreted: ~40× behind Go on raw compute, no JIT, no AOT-to-native. The scheduling primitives win benchmarks; a compute-bound handler loses them all back. There is also no Float type at all (the storefront prices in cents for a reason), no SIMD story, and fixed interpreter ceilings (4096 register slots, 256 frames, ~42 KiB per fiber until growable contexts land).
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- Language expressiveness. No generics — the cache stores Text and tells you to json.encode; no function values or closures (doctrine, but it's why every handler is a class with one method); byte-based strings with no Unicode awareness; no Result-style error values (traps + try only); pattern matching is a switch, not destructuring. Some of this is deliberate rejection, but "deliberate" doesn't make the expressiveness appear.
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- Concurrency holes the arc hasn't closed. send is one-way — no reply/request-response primitive (my own benchmarks couldn't await the actor and had to sleep); no supervision, links, or actor death (actors live until process end); unbounded mailboxes with zero backpressure; no timers beyond sleep; round-robin placement with no work stealing; multi-shard DB access still traps (stage 3 unbuilt); accept lives on one shard.
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- Production plumbing. No TLS anywhere (proxy-mandated forever), no HTTP/2 or WebSockets yet, no crypto primitives (blocked on the bit-ops-vs-builtins fork), observability is print/stderr — no metrics, tracing, or profiler; no debugger, no LSP (discussed, never built); deps are git-rev-only with no registry, no transitive resolution, no semver; blue-green deploy and schema migrations are recorded futures, not features.
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- Proof maturity. 22's benchmark battery has never run — every number so far is a scratch measurement on one machine; TSan covers one demo; no fuzzing, no CI beyond local just, and the whole ecosystem is one framework, five samples, and one committed consumer. The honest summary: the architecture is ahead of the product — the doctrine bets (ownership+inference, actors, one binary, io_uring) are landing and measurable, while the surface a developer touches daily (types, tooling, ecosystem) is years behind the languages it benchmarks against.
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## Verification 2026-08-20
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Every claim above was checked against the tree. **26 of 27 hold. One number
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does not, and two problems are worse than stated.**
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### Rejected: "~40× behind Go on raw compute"
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Unsourced. Nothing in the repo measures compute against Go. The only Go
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comparison on record runs the other way and on a different workload:
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[`plan/exploration/c-runtime/00-plan.md`](plan/exploration/c-runtime/00-plan.md)
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records the C prototype at **908,916 reads/s and 643,250 fsync-acked
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commits/s on 8 shards vs Go `net/http` at 495k/355k with ~8× worse p99** on a
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20-core box — I/O-bound serving, not compute. `runtime/bench/goref/` holds a
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Go reference program, but no compute-bound result from it is written down
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anywhere.
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The figure also contradicts this document's own closing sentence: the
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doctrine bets cannot be "measurable" while iteration 22 has never run. Drop
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the number or produce the benchmark.
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### Understated
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- **`map<K,V>` lookup is a linear scan.** `runtime/src/cont.h`: parallel
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key/value arrays, "linear scan lookup — deliberate milestone-1 KISS". Every
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`get`/`has`/`set` is O(n). For a language whose framework routes requests
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and whose planned cache is keyed, this outranks the missing `Float` as a
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compute problem — and the compute paragraph never mentions it.
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- **The multi-shard DB gap is structural, not a missing flag.**
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`wo_engine_start` (`runtime/src/vm.c`) `memset`s each worker VM to zero, so
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`rt.db` and `rt.wal` are NULL by construction off the primary;
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`wo_builtin_db` then returns `WO_T_DB "database engine not initialized"`. It
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is a clean trap rather than a crash — but any multi-shard program that
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touches the database is broken today.
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### Confirmed, with corrections to the numbers
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| Claim | Evidence |
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| --- | --- |
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| interpreted only, no JIT, no AOT | no `jit` anywhere; `specs/2026-08-01-oop-compiler-vm-design.md` records AOT-to-C as rejected |
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| no `Float`, no `Bytes` | absent from `compiler/src/types.ml`; no float builtin; `net.read` returns `Text` |
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| no SIMD | nothing in `runtime/src` or `compiler/src` |
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| fixed interpreter ceilings | **mislabeled**: 4096 is the value **stack** (`WO_STACK_SLOTS`), registers are 64 per frame (`WO_MAX_REGS`), frames 256 (`WO_MAX_FRAMES`) — all `runtime/src/wob.h`. Unlisted: `WO_MAX_SHARDS 64`, `WO_ARENA_MAX_CLASS 1024`, `WO_MAX_CATCH 64`. ~42 KiB/fiber matches the arc spec |
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| no generics | `multi T` / `map<K,V>` are runtime-provided native classes by design |
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| no function values or closures | no such form in the lexer keyword set or typechecker |
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| byte-based strings, no Unicode | `WO_B_BYTE_AT`, ASCII `WO_B_TO_LOWER`; `json.c` decodes BMP only |
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| no Result-style errors | traps + `try`/`catch` only |
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| pattern matching is a switch | `KwSwitch`/`KwCase`; no destructuring form |
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| `send` is one-way | `WO_B_SEND=69` is the last builtin (`WO_B_MAX 69u`) — no ask/reply opcode |
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| no supervision, links, actor death | nothing in the runtime |
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| unbounded mailboxes, no backpressure | `vm.h`: `msgs` is a "FIFO ring, growable"; `mcap` only grows |
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| no timers beyond sleep | `time.sleep` is the only one; no `timerfd` in the runtime |
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| round-robin placement, no work stealing | `eng_rr` cursor, `vm.c` |
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| accept on one shard | one listener, `SO_REUSEADDR` only — no `SO_REUSEPORT` |
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| no TLS | the only `tls` in the runtime is thread-local storage (`wo_tls_vm`) |
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| no HTTP/2 or WebSockets | framework `http/` is parse/serve/types/auth/multipart; h2c parked per `00-status.md` |
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| no crypto primitives | none |
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| observability is print/stderr | `WO_B_PRINT`, `PRINT_INT`, `PRINT_ERR`; no counters, tracing, or profiler |
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| no debugger, no LSP | neither exists |
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| deps git-rev only | no semver, registry, or transitive resolution in the compiler |
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| blue-green + migrations are futures | iteration 26 still pending |
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| 22's battery never run | 22 is ⬜ "needs a spec first"; no `bench/baseline.json`, no `just db-bench`; `runtime/bench/` is the retired C prototype's harness |
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| TSan covers one demo | only `scripts/fibers-accept.sh` builds and runs `wovm_tsan` |
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| no fuzzing, no CI | no `.github/`, no fuzz target |
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| one framework, five samples, one consumer | exact: `writeonce-framework`; employee, employee-list, fibers, gc-cycle, log-watcher; `web-app` |
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### Consequence
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The iteration order in
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[`stories/language-runtime-database/00-story.md`](stories/language-runtime-database/00-story.md)
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was re-sequenced against these findings on 2026-08-20 — Seq only, no `#`
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renumbered, no file moved. See that table's second re-sequencing note.
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