shoney.arickathil
d5c76d1dcf
- 00-kanban.md rebuilt: ▶ NEXT PLAN pointer (iteration 4 — emitter, corpus, `woc build`) then six buckets — stories, in progress, done, pending, discarded, learnings. It tracked only the Rust runtime before, so the whole OOP track (wovm shipped, woc Tasks 1-8 shipped) was invisible. - Board now records iteration 3's known gaps instead of silently owing them: `?T` plumbed but unenforced; E205/E201/E203/E204 dead, so structural interface satisfaction is unchecked. - New discarded.md — settled rejections with reasons so they are not re-proposed: inheritance, `abstract` newtypes, Money/SKU/Float, Dynamic/cast/ macro/extern, AOT-to-C, Menhir, shared engine state, external deployer. - RECOVERED docs/plan/exploration/blue-green-vm/00-vision.md — gone from disk, never committed (gitignored path), cited by five docs incl. principle 12. - Root cause was broader: all seven forward-roadmap plans in docs/superpowers/plans/ were untracked and ignored, on one disk only. Rules were half-fiction — 33 of 34 exploration files were already tracked, so they swallowed only *new* files. - Dropped the docs ignore rules (exploration, oop-vm, superpowers/plans, examples/agent-loop, examples/mcp-think) with a do-not-re-add comment; added __pycache__/*.pyc. `tests/` stays ignored but warns that the next plan lands the corpus there.
54 lines
5.4 KiB
Markdown
54 lines
5.4 KiB
Markdown
# Discarded — settled rejections
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Decisions that were considered and **rejected**, with the reason. This file
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exists so a settled question is not re-proposed. If you want to revisit an
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entry, argue against the reason recorded here — do not re-open it as if it were
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new.
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Status board: [`00-kanban.md`](00-kanban.md) · Doctrine: [`../00-principles.md`](../00-principles.md)
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## Language surface
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| Rejected | Date | Reason |
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| --- | --- | --- |
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| **Inheritance** — `extends`, `super`, `override`, `implements` | plan 13 / OOP spec | No hierarchies, ever. Is-a is a tagged union, has-a is composition, polymorphism is structural interfaces. Hierarchies fossilize early guesses and make dispatch, ownership, and diagnostics all harder. Principle 4. |
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| **`abstract` newtypes** (`abstract Money = Int`) | 2026-08-10 | Flipped **adopt → reject** in the systems-track verdict table. A distinct scalar type adds a conversion surface without buying safety this language needs; domain scalars stay plain `Int`/`Text`. The `Money`/`SKU` stopgap allowlist that stood in for the unbuilt feature proved the cost was real. Haxe-parity Task 7 keeps only `is`. |
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| **`Money`, `SKU` as language types** | 2026-08-10 | Removed from `builtin_scalars` and from the abstract allowlist. `Money` → `Int` (minor units), `SKU` → `Text` everywhere. |
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| **`Float` as a builtin scalar** | 2026-08-10 | Phantom: it was in `builtin_scalars` and documented as f64, but `token.ml` has no float literal and `wob.h` has no float kind — `ratio: Float` typechecked while no `Float` value could ever be written or represented. Re-add only when literals **and** a wob float kind land together. |
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| **`Dynamic` / `untyped`** | systems-track spec | Static typing is the untagged-register VM's foundation. Typed `json.decode … as T -> ?T` covers the real use. Principle 13. |
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| **`cast`** | systems-track spec | No unsafe casts. Conversions are typed; `as` exists only in the decode-target position. |
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| **`macro`** | systems-track spec | Kills the fast-compile promise. Codegen belongs to `wo gen` tooling. |
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| **`extern` / FFI** | systems-track spec | One FFI hole voids the whole memory-safety story. Capabilities are audited typed builtins. Principle 10. |
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| **`operator` overloading, `overload`** | systems-track spec | One name, one signature. Keeps dispatch and diagnostics simple. |
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| **`inline` functions** | systems-track spec | Optimization is the compiler's job. `const` compile-time values are adopted; inline *functions* are not. |
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| **User-definable generic containers** | OOP spec §3 | `multi` and `map` are runtime-provided native classes implemented in C. The VM picks the backing data structure; the language exposes only the ADT's operations. |
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## Compiler / VM architecture
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| Rejected | Reason |
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| --- | --- |
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| **AOT compilation to C** | Kills hot reload and makes builds slow. A register bytecode interpreter with computed-goto dispatch ships first; a JIT stays possible later. |
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| **Approach B — "Lua-shaped minimal" VM** | Defers the project's core risk (the hybrid borrow VM) and adds a Menhir dependency. |
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| **Approach C — "Rust-lite static regions"** | Research-grade complexity; recreates exactly the Rust ergonomics pain that mutable value semantics exists to avoid. |
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| **Menhir, ppx, any opam package** | OCaml stdlib only; handwritten lexer and recursive-descent parser. dune is a build runner, nothing more. |
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| **First-class borrows** (storable, returnable) | Second-class borrows (Hylo/Val mutable value semantics) eliminate full lifetime inference — the compiler needs only per-function flow analysis. Long-lived links go through `ref T` ids or `@gc`. |
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| **Empty-list stub for `is_abstract_type`** | 2026-08-10: a function that can never return true is dead code. Deleted outright instead. |
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## Runtime / deployment
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| Rejected | Reason |
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| --- | --- |
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| **`Arc<Mutex<Engine>>` / any shared mutable engine state** | Thread-per-core shards each own their engine, heap, and event loop; cross-shard work is an ownership-moving message send. Principle 5. |
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| **External deployer daemon** | Violates two-VMs-in-one-runtime and splits the data plane. The management plane is a runtime module with a thin CLI. |
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| **Self-hosted `.wo` deploy logic** | Bootstrap problem — the deploy path cannot be written in the language whose deployment it implements. Recorded as a much-later possibility. |
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| **Script-based / destructive schema migrations (v1)** | Additive-only auto-diff is what makes rollback unconditional: the previous version ignores fields and classes it never knew. Destructive changes reject at propose time. |
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| **Portability abstractions over Linux** | Targeting one kernel lets the runtime use its sharpest primitives directly instead of the lowest common denominator. Principle 9. |
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| **Mirrors on the commit path** | The Postgres mirror is a reconstructible backup. RAM is authoritative; reads and acks never depend on it. Principle 7. |
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## Process / docs
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| Rejected | Reason |
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| --- | --- |
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| **Per-example `principle.md` files** | 2026-08-08: one canonical repo-level [`docs/00-principles.md`](../00-principles.md) instead; examples link to it. |
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| **Minimal 3-file log-watcher sample** | Breaks the file-for-file `.hx` → `.wo` mapping and leaves the "could not express" column unproven — which is the sample's entire acceptance criterion. |
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| **Raw code in plan documents** | Plans carry concept, reason, and required behavior in words; the executor writes the code. |
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