writeonce/docs/examples/db-actor/README.md
shoney.arickathil c0b0dbb846 docs: audit all markdown against the code, fix findings, flatten status folders
- README: shipped concurrency/HTTP/WebSockets sat in the roadmap as "not yet
  available"; "no package manager" contradicted [deps]; the deps example
  would not have compiled (the key IS the module name)
- runtime/README: leads with wovm, wo-rt.c demoted to a historical section;
  dropped 2 nonexistent recipes, crates/rt, @gc refcounting, 13 suites -> 18
- employee + log-watcher READMEs claimed "does not compile"; both are gates
- error catalog: +10 emitted codes incl WO-E250, the only diagnostic the
  shipped query surface raises; recorded why the sweep rotted
- language-surface: group-by parses, then the typechecker refuses it
- 00-code-review + 00-link-audit re-run; history kept, not rewritten
- 48 dead Rust-era exploration links de-linked rather than re-pointed (their
  prose names the retired plan by number); successor map -> discarded.md
- 08-project-structure: compiler/plan/ never existed; corpus has 9 dirs, 5 empty
- releasing.md: dropped a --draft step the workflow never had
- new docs/00-doc-audit.md: findings + disposition, incl one row where the
  audit was wrong and the doc it accused was right
- status folders removed: 34 stories flat, status only in frontmatter; 252
  links recomputed from resolved paths; board/board-views/structure retaught
- story 24 -> in-progress, since frontmatter is now the only truth
- new iteration 38: fs mutation verbs + net.connect, the two capability
  families no iteration owned
- new iteration 39: gofiber/fiber v3.5.0 parity study. The ledger called
  CSRF/sessions unblocked by iteration 34's HMAC, but the runtime has no
  source of randomness at all
- linkcheck skips .dev/.superpowers: 0 broken paths, 0 bad anchors

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-26 19:20:22 +02:00

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3.4 KiB
Markdown

# `db-actor` — the database reached from any shard
> **Status: shipped — arc stage 3's acceptance gate.** Run it with
> `just db-actor`. Landed 2026-08-21 with the shard-fiber arc
> ([story 8](../../stories/language-runtime-database/08-shard-actor-runtime.md)
> · [plan](../../superpowers/plans/2026-08-20-shard-fiber-arc.md)).
The database lives on **one** shard — the owner, shard 0 — because RAM is
authoritative and a single writer is what makes the WAL's ordering meaningful.
That is a problem the moment actors are placed round-robin across cores: a
`spawn`ed actor has no say in which shard it lands on, and before stage 3 a
worker-shard `insert` trapped `WO_T_DB` with "database engine not initialized".
Stage 3's answer is a **transparent DB actor**: statements issued off the owner
shard marshal to it, execute there, and materialize their replies back. The
program's source says nothing about any of it — the same `insert` and the same
`from … select` work wherever the actor happens to run. This sample exists to
prove exactly that, which is why its acceptance criterion is *placement
independence* rather than any particular output.
## What it does
`Note` is a `@table` with a secondary index on `tag`. `Writer` is an actor: each
one inserts a row, then scans the whole table and prints the sum it sees. `main`
spawns two writers, waits, then scans once itself.
With the default shard count, round-robin placement puts at least one writer off
the owner shard — so one of those inserts and one of those scans travel the RPC
path under test, and the other does not. Both must produce the same shape.
```bash
just db-actor # the gate
woc docs/examples/db-actor/ # or build it by hand
WO_SHARDS=1 ./docs/examples/db-actor/target/db-actor # force the local path
```
## What the gate proves
`scripts/db-actor-accept.sh`, 8 checks:
| Check | Why it is shaped that way |
| --- | --- |
| multi-shard, three rounds | The writer lines are asserted as a **set**, not a sequence — scheduling decides their order, and pinning it would be testing the scheduler, not the RPC. The `main` line is exact. |
| both `WO_IO` backends forced | The reply park has to be plane-independent: io_uring and epoll must give the same answer, or the parking is leaking into semantics. |
| single shard, byte-exact | The local path is untouched by stage 3. Any drift here means the RPC changed the non-RPC case. |
| `WO_DATA` restart pair | A worker's insert must commit on the **owner's** WAL before its ack, so a restart replays it: 2 rows, then 2+2 after a second run. This is the durability claim the RPC could most easily break. |
Run under `wovm_asan` and `wovm_tsan` as well — cross-shard message passing is
exactly where a data race would hide, and TSan covering this demo is the one
place it runs.
## Read it for
- **How little the source knows.** Compare `Writer.receive` here against the
same statements in [`employee`](../employee/): identical. Transparency is the
feature.
- **Why `main` waits.** `main` is not an actor and has no mailbox, so it sleeps
rather than awaiting — the gap iteration 31's `call` closes for actors and
[24's marker](../../active-slice-2026-08-23-chat-ws-lifecycle.md) tracks.
Reasoning under the engine side: [`database/src/CODE-LOGIC.md`](../../../database/src/CODE-LOGIC.md).
Contract: [`plan/oop-vm/04-db-binding.md`](../../plan/oop-vm/04-db-binding.md).