writeonce/docs/stories/language-runtime-database/08-shard-actor-runtime.md

iteration	status	readiness	chain
8	done	ready	1

Iteration 8 — shard-actor runtime (the 8+11 concurrency arc, part 1)

Format: product/story-iteration-template. Part of Story — one language, one runtime, one database, one binary.

✅ LANDED 2026-08-21 — the arc is complete. Stage 3 closed the WO_T_DB hole: worker-shard DB statements marshal to the owner shard (requester-side slot encode, serialized owner execution, materialized reply, ack-after-owner-fsync). Proof: just db-actor 8/0 (NEW gate, docs/examples/db-actor), ASan/TSan clean, full battery green, WAL replay pair. The three stage-3 criteria below hold; the heavier concurrent-load truth is iteration 22's campaign. 22's minimal precursor (RAM-only): 500 remote inserts ≈4ms (~8µs/RPC round-trip) vs local ≈0ms; 50 remote scans ≈2–4ms. En route, a latent stage-1 bug fell: shared io_uring params raced by lazy worker init lost park wakes (~1/20 hangs) — params are per-vm now, short submits trap loud.

REFINED 2026-08-20 (developer decisions, no code): iterations 8 and 11 are one arc — the scheduler, fibers on it, then serving — because the database-ownership decision below makes a fiberless multi-shard server block a whole thread per cross-shard call. The arc's driving workload is iteration 24 (chat: WebSocket pub/sub). The pre-existing plan (docs/superpowers/plans/2026-08-01-shard-actor-vm-runtime.md) predates inferred GC (7b), the unified surface, and the DB decision — it is a source of ideas, NOT the plan of record (✖ DISCARDED 2026-08-21: epoll-based; io_uring is a must).

RE-SEQUENCED 2026-08-21 (developer decision): the brainstorm → spec → plan happened. The arc's plan of record is 2026-08-20-shard-fiber-arc.md (spec: 2026-08-20-shard-fiber-arc-design.md), and stages 1+2 LANDED 2026-08-20 on branch concurrency-arc (T1–T6, seven disclosed deviations recorded in the plan). Remaining scope: stage 3, the transparent DB actor — a correctness fix, not an optimization: worker VMs are zero-initialized, so a DB statement off the primary shard traps WO_T_DB. Concurrency-chain order: stage 3 → 22 → 31 → 24 → 23 → 32.

Settled decisions (2026-08-20)

1. The database is an actor. The engine (wo_db + WAL) lives on one owner shard; every query/write from another shard is a message send, and results come back materialized (queries already copy rows out — the model was built for this). Doctrine-pure: no lock, no shared mutable state. Consequence, accepted deliberately: callers must PARK while the reply travels, which is why 8 and 11 ship as one arc. (Rejected: a coarse engine lock — bends the doctrine and caps write scaling anyway; partitioned tables — the real scale answer, but it waits for a measured need, not v1.)
2. One concurrency surface: everything is an actor address. spawn returns an address whether the spawnee lands on this shard (a fiber) or another (placement policy's call); send always moves ownership; a same-heap send skips the ring and is cheap. The language never shows a fiber-vs-actor split. (This dissolves iteration 11's "handle vs address" open question.)
3. Driving workload: chat (iteration 24) — rooms, broadcast, N concurrent WebSocket clients, one binary. The arc's acceptance is the chat sample's, not only synthetic corpora.
4. Order — SUPERSEDED 2026-08-21. Originally 22 → the 8+11 arc → 23; in fact the arc's stages 1+2 landed before 22 ever ran (accepted deviation — the before/after delta is owed and lands as 22's multi-shard pass). Current order: stage 3 → 22 → 31 → 24 → 23 → 32. 23 still waits for the arc's tick boundary and 22's baseline.

Goals

• The runtime scales past one core the doctrine way: pinned thread-per-core shards, each owning its own heap and event loop; cross-shard communication is a message send that moves ownership — shared mutable state never exists.
• The language grows spawn/send (the unified address surface); garbage collection stays per-shard (7b's collector is already per-shard by construction), so no global pause appears at any core count.
• The database keeps its single-writer truth by BEING an actor on its owner shard.

Acceptance Criteria

• What to achieve?
  • Given a program spawning actors across shards,
  • when an owned object is sent to another shard,
  • then the sender can no longer touch it (compile-time move), the receiver owns it, and its eventual free routes back to its allocation-home arena.
• What to achieve?
  • Given debug builds with shard-ownership asserts,
  • when the deterministic actor corpus runs under ASan and TSan,
  • then zero races, zero leaks, and identical output across runs.
• What to achieve?
  • Given a reference to a TRACED object (GC-ness is inferred since 7b — there is no @gc to write),
  • when code attempts to send it cross-shard,
  • then the compiler rejects it: aliased references cannot cross heap boundaries, and the diagnostic names the inferred-traced class and why it is traced. (This criterion originally said @gc; restated 2026-08-20 in inference terms — same rule, current language.)
• What to achieve?
  • Given handlers on serving shards querying and writing through the DB-owner shard,
  • when the employee/web-app matrices run multi-shard,
  • then every answer is byte-identical to the single-shard run and the WAL's ack-after-durable contract is unchanged.
• What to achieve? (stage-3 refinement, 2026-08-21)
  • Given a worker shard issuing a write through the DB actor,
  • when the process is killed between the worker's send and the owner's commit,
  • then the write was never acknowledged AND replay shows no partial state — a write RPC is exactly one owner-shard commit, and the ack crosses shards only after the owner's fsync.
• What to achieve? (stage-3 refinement, 2026-08-21)
  • Given a multi-shard boot,
  • when workers start serving,
  • then WAL replay has already completed on the primary, and no worker ever opens the WAL or the data directory (asserted in debug builds).
• What to achieve? (stage-3 refinement, 2026-08-21)
  • Given concurrent workers hammering reads and writes at one table,
  • when the deterministic multi-shard corpus runs under TSan,
  • then no torn read exists — every statement sees the serialized moment its envelope executes on the owner shard (replies are materialized copies). Full guarantee map: the contract table in Info below.

Out Of Scope

• Cross-shard transactions (2PC) — the DB actor serializes writers, so iteration 18's transaction { } is unaffected; distributing it is a later story.
• Fiber details beyond the shared scheduler substrate — part 2 (iteration 11) owns them.
• WebSocket framing — the framework's (iteration 24's) job.

Info

The arc's measured delta (iteration 22's first campaign, 2026-08-21, bench/baseline.json — N=20000, 4 mix actors, real-disk WO_DATA; single-shard column = the local path, multi-shard = the stage-3 RPC):

metric	WO_SHARDS=1	default cores	reading
seed inserts/s (ram)	257,416	297,619	local either way (primary seeds); parity ✓
seed inserts/s (durable)	4,492	4,478	fsync-per-commit ≈220µs dominates — the 57× ram gap is iteration 23's case
read ops/s (ram, primary)	1,630	1,488	point lookups are O(table): the probe walks every slab — the read-path finding
mixread ops/s (actors)	1,280	21	the RPC price × O(table) probes × owner serialization — the arc's honest cost until reads index properly
msgrate msgs/s	13,424,620	2,445,944	same-heap vs mutex-inbox: 5.5× — deviation 4's number; rings stay unearned until this is the bottleneck

Guarantee contract (stage-3 refinement 2026-08-21; moved here from the slice's marker doc when it landed):

property	state
Atomicity	per-statement ✅ (WAL record replays whole-or-not-at-all); multi-statement = transaction { }, iteration 18, ⏸ held. Stage 3: a worker write RPC is exactly ONE owner-shard commit — a crash between send and commit leaves no ack and no partial state.
Durability	✅ fsync-per-commit, ack-after-durable; the ack crosses shards only AFTER the owner's fsync (just db-actor's WAL pair). Power-loss rides fdatasync semantics; 22's kill battery is the scripted proof.
Crash recovery	✅ boot replay, torn-tail drop, index rebuild; replay completes on the primary before any worker serves (main.c boots the engine before the shards). 22 scripts the restart proof.
Concurrency control	✅ stage 3 — the DB actor serializes every statement; replies are materialized copies, no torn read by construction. Cross-statement snapshots arrive with 18.
Space reclamation	RAM ✅ (deleted rows free their slot — ids never reused, slots are); disk ✖ → databasev2 story 3, end of chain.

• The C proving ground (docs/plan/exploration/c-runtime/, phases A–F: epoll loops, eventfd mail) is the substrate this lifts into wovm. (Path restated 2026-08-20; the old runtime/wo-rt.c reference was stale — that tree was removed with the Rust runtime.)
• The VM's object header has carried a shard id since iteration 2 — no relayout.
• Gated by the benchmark: landing the arc means re-running 22 at the concurrency scale it unlocks and recording the before/after delta; it is also where 4 gets a thread to overlap durability against.

Proposed Solution

Execute stage 3 of the plan of record (2026-08-20-shard-fiber-arc.md): the DB-actor migration — engine calls off the owner shard become message sends with parked replies, closing the WO_T_DB hole. Stages 1+2 (scheduler, fibers, unified spawn/send, WO-E222 traced-send rejection, cross-shard envelopes with home-routed frees) landed 2026-08-20. After stage 3: 22 measures, then iteration 24 proves the arc. Actor lifecycle (request/response, backpressure, supervision, timers) is deliberately NOT the arc's scope — it is iteration 31.