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writeonce/docs/stories/wmux/00-story.md
shoney.arickathil ab8ef64cd9 docs(rt2): runtime-v2 track — the runtime beyond sockets 
- five stories under docs/stories/runtime-v2/: 1 streaming subprocess
  (42's follow-up; five forks incl. the mailbox-cap collision), 2 PTY,
  3 signals-as-events (signalfd lean), 4 termios adoption, 5 SCM_RIGHTS
  fd passing; 00-story states the arc — the plane learned sockets in
  8/11/35, files in 6, this adds processes/terminals/signals
- build order 1 -> 2 -> 3; 4 and 5 startable alone; all readiness:
  refine, brainstormed on demand
- board: Five tracks; "▸ runtime-v2" pending section; wmux section now
  points at it; graph section 6 nodes carry runtime-v2 numbers + links
- wmux stories re-reference the track; prefix `rt2` claimed
- linkcheck: 0 broken

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
(cherry picked from commit e0451cb4889bb3d03429c0276d03c090269a5ced)
2026-09-15 01:15:30 +02:00

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Story — wmux, the writeonce terminal multiplexer

The fourth track, and the first whose product is an end-user program rather than a library or the toolchain: wmux, a tmux alternative written in .wo. Where porch/ proves writeonce can carry a web framework, this track proves it can carry a native fd-and-process workload — PTYs, signals, raw terminals, fd passing — the territory the alacritty, tmux and zen-browser parity studies mapped on 2026-09-01.

Numbering restarts at 1 and is local to this track. Frontmatter carries track: wmux; iteration 1 was briefly language iteration 43 and keeps was_language_iteration: so a search for the old number still finds it. Status rules are the repo's, unchanged.

Why a separate track

Same three reasons porch got one, plus a fourth:

  1. Different substrate, different gates. wmux is .wo source, proven by its own gate (just wmux when it exists) and a replay corpus, not by the conformance corpus.
  2. Different cadence. Its runtime prerequisites — the runtime-v2/ track: streaming subprocess, PTY, signals, termios, fd passing — are each builtin-sized runtime slices; the product iterations on top are .wo work.
  3. It is a product surface. A working tmux alternative is the strongest public claim the language can make about native workloads.
  4. The upstream split is explicit. When a wmux iteration needs a new builtin, that half is a runtime-v2/ iteration, called out by name — the way iteration 42 (bounded subprocess) landed first in the language track before the arc had a folder. The gap chain lives in dependency graph section 6.

Where the sequence came from

The tmux study, measured against a shallow clone in .dev/reference/tmux: ~112k lines of C, two dependencies, a ~27k-line multiplexer kernel, a ~12k-line command/format/options DSL that dissolves into writeonce language features, and one structural trick — the client passes its own tty fd to the server with SCM_RIGHTS, which is all detach/attach is. wmux's beyond-tmux leg is native to this stack: sessions, layout and scrollback in durable: true tables, replayed from the WAL after a server restart — state tmux loses by design.