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* Compare a whole row with one memcmp before looking at cellsGabriel Schneider2026-08-25
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | `Surface.cells` is contiguous and row-major, so a row is a single `memcmp` against the shadow grid - and on a keystroke eleven of twelve rows are untouched. The per-cell loop was ~40 branchy comparisons per row where this is one call over 1,120 bytes. Byte equality implies visual equality, which is what makes the shortcut sound: a row that compares equal cannot be hiding a changed cell, and a row that differs only in padding falls through to the per-cell path, which is correct and merely slower. Measured on the die at 360 MHz: the grid walk 246 -> 226 us. That is a small win and the reason is worth recording - at 27 KB read per frame and about 6 cycles per byte, this stage is now bounded by L2MEM bandwidth rather than by comparison work, so there is little left in it. It is also why board compute scaled 2.6x rather than 4x when the core clock went up 4x. Verified with a canonical-style A/B: reference path (`shadow_grid = false`) and incremental path, same 18-step workload, same clock - identical characters and identical resolved style in every cell. snap 95/95, hxdiff 481/0, hxparity 561/0, unit-test, tty and p4 both build.
* Compare shadow-grid cells as bytes, not through std.meta.eqlGabriel Schneider2026-08-25
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | `Cell.visuallyEqual` is the semantically exact answer and too slow to ask 480 times a frame: `std.meta.eql` on a `CellStyle` recurses through a colour union and eight booleans, and the walk measured 1.45 ms on the die - about 270 cycles to compare a 28-byte struct. `sameCell` in src/p4.zig does it as bytes. That is safe in the direction that matters: byte equality IMPLIES visual equality, so it can never claim two different cells are the same. It can miss an equality - scratch bytes past `len`, or padding - and the only cost of that is one redundant `writeCell` which vaxis then diffs away. Defaults are still compared by meaning, because an unpainted cell's text and style are whatever the previous frame left in them. Measured: the grid walk 1.45 -> 0.98 ms, a keystroke 8.87 -> 8.37 ms fixed. Verified the way a rendering change has to be. The A/B harness now hashes the SGR state of every cell as well as its character, because the first version compared text only and would have passed a colour regression in silence. Reference path (`shadow_grid = false`, clear and write everything) and incremental path were each run against the same 19-step workload on the die and the reconstructed screens are identical in both text and per-row style hash. snap 95/95, hxdiff 481 cases 0 mismatches, hxparity 561 cases 0 mismatches, unit-test, and tty / p4 / gui all build.
* Make a keystroke 2.6x cheaper by not asking Unicode about ASCIIGabriel Schneider2026-08-25
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | A keystroke on the ESP32-P4 cost 17.0 ms and the goal is 4. Profiling the core in that board's exact configuration - 40x12, tree-sitter disabled, via `zig build perf -Dtree-sitter=disabled -- --cols 40 --rows 12 --only small` - named the cost, and it was Unicode machinery answering questions about the letter `y`. Four changes, each a fast path guarded so that non-ASCII text takes exactly the road it took before. `modal.graphemeStart` was 21.5% of a keystroke, the single largest item. It iterates graphemes FROM THE START of the text with the full UAX #29 break state machine until it passes the offset, and the render path calls it once per visible row with a column offset - so the cost followed the cursor's distance along its line. That is the shape measured on the die, where inserting at column 320 of a fixed 320-character line cost 7.8 ms more than inserting at column 0 of the same line. In UAX #29 every ASCII scalar is its own cluster with ONE exception, GB3 (CR joined to LF); every other rule that could extend a cluster - Extend, ZWJ, SpacingMark, Prepend, Regional_Indicator - is spelled with non-ASCII scalars. So an ASCII byte whose predecessor is also ASCII, and not that CR-LF pair, IS a boundary. O(1), and sound rather than approximate. `Surface.print` then became the largest at 26.2%: per character it took a UTF-8 length, a decode, a FRESHLY CONSTRUCTED grapheme iterator, a slice validation and a width lookup, to conclude that `y` is one cell. Printable ASCII followed by ASCII takes none of that now. Same guard, same reason. `file_pane.graphemeDisplayWidth` was 6.9%, essentially all of it asking `gwidth` about ASCII. Bounded to 0x20..0x7e on purpose: DEL and the C0 controls are not one printable cell and `gwidth` stays the authority on them. `modal.lineSlice` searched for "\n" with the generic substring search where a memchr does; it is called once per visible row per frame. Measured at the P4's geometry and configuration, on the host: render 55 -> 12 us, key-down 483 -> 24 us, key-right 327 -> 13 us, edit-char 205 -> 46 us. On the die, the per-character cost of a keystroke fell from 54.3 to 6.9 us - 7.9x - and a keystroke at a 160-character line from 25.56 ms to 15.36 ms. ## The shadow grid, and why it is static `src/p4.zig`'s `present` copied all 480 cells into vaxis every frame, which measured 6.75 ms on the die - 57% of a keystroke - and was paid whether or not anything changed: a second render with nothing new cost the same as the first. vaxis diffs its own grid, but only after being told every cell, and being told is the expensive part. So `present` now keeps the previous Surface and tells vaxis only what moved. `Cell.visuallyEqual` is the right comparison and already existed. Copy: 6.75 -> 1.45 ms. The grid lives in `.bss`, sized by `max_cols` x `max_rows` at comptime, and that is not a micro-optimisation. The first version allocated it from the editor's heap; on a board whose 384 KiB is nearly spoken for, that is exactly the kind of change that works and then breaks something else three steps away. `shadow_grid` is a comptime A/B switch, kept deliberately. With it false, `present` behaves as it did before - clear and write every cell - which is the reference any measurement should be compared against, and the way to tell a rendering bug from a rendering difference. It earned its keep immediately: the two paths were run against the same 19-step workload on the die - inserts, deletes, motions that move the modified-marker, a line outgrowing the viewport, backspaces that shrink it - and the reconstructed screens are byte-identical. ## Verification `snap` 95/95 scripts, `hxdiff` 481 cases 0 mismatches, `hxparity` 561 cases 0 mismatches, `unit-test`, `image-harness`, `pdf-harness`, `mupdf-check`, and tty / p4 / gui all build. The rendering changes are exactly the sort that pass a latency benchmark while corrupting a screen, so the snapshot parity suite is the one that matters here and it is unchanged. `test/perf.zig` gains `--cols`/`--rows`/`--only`. The screen's shape is one of the things that table exists to hold constant, and 40x12 is not a scaled guess at the board - it is the board. `--only` exists because under `perf record` one 63 ms cell on the largest fixture swamps every sample from the case being asked about. ## Found, not fixed `vx.resize` fails on this board: a runtime geometry change hits its allocation failure path, restores the previous size and returns, so 80 bytes go out where 1,392 should. Verified independent of everything above - it reproduces with `shadow_grid` false. The board therefore has one geometry for the life of a session, which is why the staleness test above compares two firmwares rather than resizing one.
* A fourth platform: pardes as ESP32-P4 firmware, bytes in and bytes outGabriel Schneider2026-08-25
`-Dplatform=p4 -Dtarget=riscv32-freestanding` emits a single freestanding OBJECT exporting a seven-function C ABI, not an executable. The board's toolchain (../05-zig-p4) owns `_start`, the linker script and the UART driver and links this in. The seam is bytes rather than types, so neither side can accidentally depend on the other's internals, and a signature that drifts fails at link time. The serial line is the whole of the I/O. `src/p4.zig` drives vaxis unchanged over it: the renderer is a byte writer and `queryTerminalSend` is a byte writer, so the terminal emulator on the host answers the capability handshake and the firmware sees a real terminal. Measured going out over the wire on attach: alt screen, in-band resize, cursor report, kitty keyboard, kitty graphics, DA1. THREE WORDS EXIST ONLY HERE. `src/board_memory.zig` implements `Peek`, `Poke` and `Hexdump`, gated on `builtin.os.tag == .freestanding and !isWasm()` - derived from the TARGET, because they are a property of running with no OS under you rather than a product option, and because wasm is freestanding too and is exactly what must be excluded: in a browser an address is an offset into the linear memory this editor's own heap lives in. Every access goes through `*allowzero volatile`: a peripheral register is not memory, and address 0 is an ordinary unmapped address on this bus. One 4 KiB cap per command, set by the console rather than the memory - an unbounded dump would wedge the only console the board has for eleven hours. Measured on ESP32-P4 rev v1.3 silicon, driven from a host terminal: Peek 0x501101a4 0x0e63ce71, then 0xaeaa6919 on a second read - the RNG register, so the volatile loads are not folded Poke 0x5011002c 0xdeadbeef LP_STORE0; a later Peek returned 0xdeadbeef Hexdump 0x5011002c 32 16 bytes a row, hex columns and an ASCII gutter Peek 0x50110001 `peek: MisalignedAddress` on the message row That last line is the one that matters. A misaligned 32-bit access traps, and a trap in firmware is a watchdog reset that takes the session with it, so the check that turns it into a message is the reason the file is hand-written rather than a generic reader. BARE METAL BOOTS AN EMPTY OUTPUT BUFFER. Every other boot layout in `init` makes a shell, and on this platform that is not a preference but an impossibility: nothing to fork, no pty to give a terminal pane. Booting one anyway produced precisely what that describes - a pane whose tag ends in `Filter`, no gutter, no buffer, and every keystroke vanishing into the Fallback's silent pty. An output buffer is also what the platform's own words want, since Peek, Poke and Hexdump each fill one. Sized for the board rather than for a desktop: * `allocators.zig` gains a p4 tier that is ALL fallback - every capacity is zero, so each arena spills immediately to the 384 KiB heap the firmware hands over, and no megabyte-shaped static reservation lands in `.bss`. * `source_manifest.zig`'s allowlist is EMPTY on p4. The table is ~0.95 MiB of rodata against a 1.5 MiB flash partition; the firmware's filesystem is the serial host's, through the Host vtable. * The grid is clamped and the clamp is measured, not guessed: every cell is paid for four times (vaxis Screen + InternalScreen, pardes Surface + previous_cells), so 40x12 fits and 80x24 exhausts the heap during `Pardes.init`. * `Vaxis.resize` deinits both screens before allocating replacements, so a failed resize leaves vaxis rendering nothing. The p4 shell keeps the previous geometry on failure instead of leaving a half-applied one. Also here: `output_pane_integration_test.zig` had an exhaustive switch over `Platform` that adding `.p4` left unhandled, which broke `zig build unit-test` outright - the native test binary is the one consumer no platform build compiles. 346 tests pass again.