Epic: architecture rearrangement — TU-based pipeline, differential gates, generated maintenance (docs/architecture-review-2026-07.md)

[PurHur]

Category

architecture · epic

Summary

Full review in docs/architecture-review-2026-07.md (PR #16072). One-line thesis: the constraint is no longer feature coverage — it is IR correctness discipline, redundant lowering (47% of every build), and maintenance drag.

Target architecture

Everything after the opcode layer becomes a translation unit with an ABI manifest and its own llvm.global_ctors entry: script TU + cached helper TUs + prelinked runtime, linked with plain ld semantics. Every artifact class gets a VM-differential gate. Docs/counters are generated, never hand-edited.

Sequenced plan

1. ✅ AOT build+execute+VM-differential smoke in fast gate (PR Gates: AOT build+execute+VM-differential smoke in the fast gate (#16010 prevention) #16072) — kills the Regression: every phpc build fails module verification since #15866 — GC bridge miscasts + helper PHP bodies dragging broken lowerings into all builds (lib/JIT/Builtin/GcCollectCyclesRuntime.php) #16010 class
2. ✅ spine-sync.sh one-command maintenance (PR Gates: AOT build+execute+VM-differential smoke in the fast gate (#16010 prevention) #16072)
3. Fix four Regression: user-script AOT builds broken for core string builtins — preg_match capture assign, explode CRLF, str_contains, substr negative length (bin/compile.php) #15642 builtins → flip smoke tier 2 to enforced
4. Helper ABI registry + per-TU ctors — unblocks AOT: split user-script builds into cached runtime TU + script TU — ~50% of every phpc build re-lowers identical JitHelpers (lib/Runtime.php) #15889 (design + prototype in PR AOT: split-compilation helper-runtime cache — experimental scaffold (#15889) #16022)
5. Complete split compilation: cached helper TUs, parallel emit (measured: hello 3.0→1.9 s, project 5.3→2.2 s)
6. Typed scalar fast paths (AOT perf: native fibo ~6× slower than Zend 8.2 — boxed call/arith overhead in generated code (lib/JIT.php) #15907 — native fibo is 5.8× slower than Zend today; the 2020 table shows 10× faster is achievable) + bench deltas in gate
7. VM 1M-iteration ceiling + loud fatals (VM: 1M-iteration loops exit 255 silently after ~30 s — benchmarks/ compute suite cannot run on the VM (bin/vm.php) #15906)
8. Spine footnotes → one generated include; benchmark rows regenerated from probe results
9. Gen-0 behavioral-staleness warning (tree-hash stamp)
10. Honest gen-3 without sidecar recovery (Gen-1+ #1: Honest full-spine native compile without gen-0 sidecar fallback #15597/Gen-1+ #7: Honest compile CI gate (fail loop probe on sidecar recovery) #15603)

End state

Sub-second rebuilds, native ≥ Zend on compute, and a gate system that structurally cannot ship a broken compiler.

[PurHur]

claim: cursor-agent-lane-b — fixing user AOT helper-cache unit init corrupting echo of "0"/"1" (step 4 follow-up)

[PurHur]

Merged #17069 — skip cached helper-unit __init__ for user-script AOT builds until #16075 step 4 (global_ctors isolation). Fixes helper-runtime cache default-on corrupting echo "0"/echo "1" and get_html_translation_table AOT count ternaries.

Verification:

• vendor/bin/phpunit --filter 'echo_short_string_literals|get_html_translation_table' → OK
• php script/bootstrap-inventory.php --check → OK 4190/4190

[PurHur]

Cleanup bot (jul09 wave28): pruned 80 stale remote agent/* branches with no open PR — orphan WIP from Jul 1–8 whose linked issues are closed and fixes already landed on master via other PRs.

Examples: agent/issue-14324-inet-ntop-ipv4-mapped, agent/issue-15149-jit-jumpif-insert-block, agent/issue-17301-bzopen-stream-api, agent/bootstrap-inventory-2026-07-06, …

Preserved: all 7 open PR heads; branches for open issues (#10744, #16935, #17277, #17380, …); in-flight AOT WIP (agent/issue-17391-dom-aot-toobject, agent/issue-10492-process-aot-split, …).

Branch hygiene only — no repros/tests/issues removed.