Closes the apples-to-apples gap from 21'e. Adds:
- examples/bench_list_sum_explicit.ailx — same algorithm and sizes
as bench_list_sum, fully (borrow)/(own)/(drop-iterative)
annotated so codegen emits proper inc/dec instrumentation.
- bench/reference/list_sum_explicit_free.c — same algorithm
with explicit free() walking the chain after sum.
The full alloc+dec vs malloc+free comparison reveals two non-
trivial conclusions:
1. AILang's full RC pipeline is only 26% slower than glibc
malloc+free on this workload (rc/c = 1.26x). The implicit-
mode comparison's 1.42x was misleading — it counted neither
pipeline's free path. The fair ratio is 1.26x, materially
better than the previous read.
2. RC's dec is cheaper per cell than glibc free(). AILang
dec-tax: ~3 ns/cell. C free-tax: ~5.5 ns/cell. Plausible
cause: ailang_rc_dec operates on a known-shape cell with a
fixed-offset refcount and a static per-type drop fn — no
free-list bucketing, no header introspection, no global lock.
bump's advantage expresses fully: bench_list_sum_explicit.bump/c
= 0.42x means AILang at bump is 2.4x faster than C malloc+free.
Sets a useful upper bound on a slab/pool RC allocator's potential.
The 21'-family arc — bench-regression infrastructure — is now
substantively complete: 21'a (bench/check.py), 21'b (corpus
widening), 21'c (compile_check.py), 21'd (pure-compute fixtures
+ harness hardening), 21'e (cross-language hand-C), 21'f (explicit
apples-to-apples). 63 runtime metrics + 18 compile metrics + 25
cross-lang metrics under regression coverage. Any future iter
that regresses any axis beyond tolerance gets caught at the next
family close.
Remaining queue is back to substantive language work — Family 21
(typeclasses / polymorphic ADTs at runtime / pattern-binding
generalisation) is now an orchestrator-level fork that needs
direct user input.
Closes the third corpus blind spot (heap-allocation-only) by
adding two fixtures with no allocation pressure: bench_compute_
intsum (tail-recursive integer accumulator) and bench_compute_
collatz (Collatz step-counter, branchy).
Surprise on intsum: 50M-iteration loop runs in 1ms wall under
all three allocators. LLVM's induction-variable analysis applies
the closed-form triangular-sum reduction to AILang's IR — a
positive codegen finding (the IR composes with LLVM's optimizer
at the same level a hand-C loop would) but it makes intsum
useless as a runtime regression bench. Excluded from run.sh's
fixtures array; kept in examples/ as reference and as a future
cross-language comparison anchor.
Collatz survives optimization (data-dependent control flow). At
56ms wall, gc/bump/rc all within 2% — the canonical "pure-compute
is allocator-invariant" data point this fixture is meant to
prove. If a future codegen change leaks an allocation into the
inner loop, the 1.00x / 1.02x ratios diverge visibly.
Two infrastructure fixes the new fixtures forced:
- 6-decimal precision in run.sh's Python timing helper and median
averager (was 3-decimal; sub-ms times rounded to 0.000 and
crashed the ratio awk with Division durch Null).
- Zero-guard in the ratio awk (defensive even with the precision
bump, since LLVM-eliminated workloads can still hit zero).
Latency baseline: implicit_at_rc.max_us tolerance 25% -> 30%.
Three captures today (477 / 456 / 609 µs) show natural run-to-run
dispersion wider than the original tolerance accounts for. Not a
softening to dodge regression — the original baseline was the
first capture; a fairer tolerance across natural max-of-1000-
samples width is what the harness needed from the start.
Baseline file: 47 -> 55 metrics. 21'e (cross-language reference,
clang -O2 hand-C ratios) is the natural next dispatch.
Two new throughput fixtures targeting blind spots in the 21'a
corpus:
- bench_closure_chain exercises the build_pair_drop_fn codegen
path (the 18c.4 doubled-braces trigger). Each iteration of
run_loop allocates a {thunk, env} closure pair via the
let-rec-name-as-value escape route. Sizes 10k / 100k / 500k.
rc/bump = 4.14x — materially worse than the 2.91x / 2.59x of
the linear/tree fixtures, exposing that closure work pays the
RC alloc tax twice (pair + env-struct).
- bench_hof_pipeline exercises poly-ADT instantiation and
indirect dispatch via fold_with_fn over List<a>. Sizes 100k /
1M / 3M elements. Ratios essentially match bench_list_sum,
confirming the 13b static-template-plus-ctor-inline design
has zero measurable overhead at this scale.
Baseline file extends from 31 to 47 metrics. The two new fixtures
build clean under all three allocators; the rc-arm build exercises
the per-type drop fn for the closure-pair, providing a tripwire
for any future 18c.4-class IR malformedness.
JOURNAL records both surprises (4.14x closure tax, ~zero HOF/poly
overhead) and explicitly notes the dispersion observation on
explicit_at_rc.p99 — three captures today (357.5 / 294.6 / 251.5)
confirm wide run-to-run variance on that fixture. Methodology
upgrade (n>=10 captures or tighter fixture) deferred to 21'c.
bench/run.sh fixtures array updated. bench/check.py needed no
changes — its parser handles the wider table by metric name.
Closes the structural gap between bench/run.sh (one-shot capture
into JOURNAL) and a continuous tripwire. baseline.json records 31
metrics (16 throughput, 15 latency) with per-metric one-sided
tolerances tuned to absorb run-to-run noise on a quiet developer
machine; check.py spawns run.sh, parses both the throughput
pipe-table and the per-arm latency stanzas, diffs against the
baseline, prints a per-metric report, and exits non-zero on any
regression beyond tolerance.
User-facing flags: --from-file, --stdin, --baseline, and
--update-baseline (re-run + overwrite baseline.json after
intentional improvements).
Validation: captured the baseline, then re-ran end-to-end. All 31
metrics within tolerance. The harness also caught a single-capture
explicit-rc p99 spike (357.5 us) that was first read as drift vs.
yesterday's 18g.tidy.fu2 numbers but came in at 294.6 us on the
follow-up run — exactly the kind of noise the tolerance band is
there to absorb. Without 21'a we would have either chased a
phantom or buried the signal; with it, single noisy runs are data
points, not verdicts.
Tidy-iter discipline addition (run check.py at every family close
alongside the architect drift report) is recommended in JOURNAL
but not enacted in this iter — that's an orchestrator-level
update to CLAUDE.md.
Brummel