writeonce/docs/stories/language-runtime-database/11-fibers.md

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# Iteration 11 — fibers (green threads on the shard scheduler)
> Format: fiberloom `product/story-iteration-template`. Part of
> [Story — one language, one runtime, one database, one binary](00-story.md).
## Goals
- Concurrency **inside** a shard the doctrine way: cooperative fibers
scheduled by the VM — a fiber is the interpreter state wovm already
isolates (register windows + frame stack + pc), made per-fiber. One
kernel task per core stays the rule; thousands of fibers run above it
where the kernel tops out at hundreds of threads (CFS O(log N),
~8 MiB + ~20 µs per thread vs an arena-allocated fiber context).
- **Preemption by reduction budget**, the Erlang shape: the dispatch loop
counts down and parks the fiber at zero — no signals, no safepoints, no
stack copying, deterministic replay.
- **Blocking builtins park instead of block** on server shards: the same
`net`/`time`/`fs` calls that block the thread in program mode hand their
fd to the shard's epoll/io_uring loop and resume on completion. One API,
same source text, no async/await, no function coloring — ever.
- Cross-fiber sends follow the iteration 8 rule — ownership moves — on the
cheaper same-heap path.
## Acceptance Criteria
- What to achieve?
- **Given** a shard running thousands of spawned fibers with one hot
compute loop among them,
- **when** the reduction budget expires,
- **then** the hot fiber parks, every other fiber makes progress
(starvation-free corpus fixture), and output is identical across
runs (deterministic scheduling).
- What to achieve?
- **Given** a fiber blocked in a stdlib builtin on a server shard,
- **when** the completion arrives on the shard's event loop,
- **then** the fiber resumes with the result while the shard served
other fibers in the interim — one OS thread, verified by TID.
- What to achieve?
- **Given** a parked fiber at shard shutdown,
- **when** the shard unwinds it,
- **then** every drop map runs (ASan zero leaks) — parked fibers die
as cleanly as trapped ones. (Iteration 12's blue-green drain reuses
exactly this unwind path.)
- What to achieve?
- **Given** `@gc` objects referenced only from a parked fiber's frames,
- **when** the per-shard cycle collector scans,
- **then** fiber stacks are roots — nothing live is collected, nothing
dead survives.
## Out Of Scope
- Fiber migration across shards (ownership doctrine forbids it; cross-shard
is a message send, iteration 8).
- Priorities, timers, structured-concurrency policy — recipe-box
capabilities for a later `.wo` library, not runtime policy.
- Program mode: stays single-fiber in v1 (blocking legal, log-watcher
needs nothing more).
- async/await keyword — permanently rejected surface, not deferred.
## Info
- Research note: [`docs/plan/exploration/fibers/00-fibers.md`](../../plan/exploration/fibers/00-fibers.md)
— kernel's-eye evidence (task_struct costs, CFS collapse at high task
counts) and the precedent survey (BEAM reductions adopted; Go stack
copying and Tokio coloring rejected; Loom's park-under-blocking-API
matches the stdlib posture).
- Vision origin: [blue-green vision §3](../../plan/exploration/blue-green-vm/00-vision.md);
iteration 8's scheduler is the substrate this extends.
- Open questions to settle in the spec: spawn surface (handle vs actor
address), budget size and check granularity, parked-fiber drop
semantics, run-queue fairness (FIFO v1).
## Proposed Solution
- No implementation plan exists yet — this iteration starts with the
brainstorming → spec → writing-plans chain (the superpowers path every
prior iteration followed), then executes that plan. The research note
above is the brainstorm's entry material.