The Great Retirement

Cold Boot closed arc 241 Phase 1 on May 28 — four argspec parsers collapsed to one canonical parse_argspec_triples, the parser-divergence class warded. That was the parsers. This is the forms. Across May 28–30, the rest of arc 241 made defn the one and only way to define a thing in wat, and tore out everything that wasn’t — fourteen stones of subtraction.

The center of the stretch was a single move repeated until the zoo was empty: name the legacy form, mint its canonical def* replacement, HARD CUT the old one, rewrite every call-site to nothing left behind. No back-compat, no privileged path — a retired form dies everywhere. That last clause is doctrine the user has held since the retirements began: a HARD CUT that leaves a “stdlib bypass” or a “substrate-internal” exception is not a HARD CUT, and every stone in this arc was held to it.

The Metadata Map

Before the forms could collapse, the substrate needed one mechanism for binding-level metadata — the thing the old *-restricted forms had each invented their own way of carrying.

Phase 2 minted it (stones 241.6 7c0ddacd, 241.7 4e681263): an optional {...} map on any def/defn, stored in SymbolTable.binding_metadata (runtime.rs:1778), read back through a new reflection verb :wat::runtime::metadata-of (eval_metadata_of, runtime.rs:13752). The verb returns #wat.core/Some / #wat.core/None per the no-semantic-abuse-of-Option doctrine — presence is a variant, not a flavor smuggled into Option. The defn macro template in wat/core.wat stayed unchanged: quasiquote is a template, not evaluable, so the substrate enforces the binding-vs-value layer by peeling fn-embedded metadata rather than branching the macro. One map, one reflection path; the *-restricted forms now had somewhere to fold into.

The Form-Zoo Falls

Phase 3 used that map and the HARD-CUT pattern to retire the entire legacy form-zoo (stones 241.8–241.17):

defstruct / defenum (241.8 f6cb564f, 241.9 184f54bf) — struct, struct-restricted, and enum retired; parse_struct / parse_struct_restricted / parse_enum deleted. 33-file cascade each.
define → defn (241.11 db656cbb) — the largest cascade in the arc, ~271 call-sites, the bandaid-rip with receipts. It landed on a substrate that teaches: stone 241.10 had just minted src/remedy/, so the retirement and the ranked “did you mean defn?” correction shipped fused.
The four residual forms — the scheme-style leftovers, enumerated and cut one by one: defalias replaces define-alias (241.12 7244cf43); define-dispatch HARD CUT with the 445-line src/dispatch.rs deleted and DispatchRegistry with it (241.13 86d123b7); def-restricted / defn-restricted retired with restriction absorbed into the metadata map as :restricted-to (241.14 839cf9e6); the define eval-time residue completed (241.16 0276a11c).
The zombie purge (241.15 db6fac9a) — :wat::core::try and the lowercase option::expect / result::expect HARD CUT.
defmacro (241.17 de3ef5a8) — migrated to the canonical signature, closing arc 177 by absorption.

When the dust settled there was one parser, one def* definer family, one metadata mechanism, and no scheme-era residue anywhere in the tree.

Two Homes

The arc didn’t only delete — it minted two namespaced homes, each driven through a vigilia to convergence.

src/remedy/ (stone 241.10 b98d8d1a — “the third bar crossed”). The substrate stopped just rejecting a retired form and started teaching the fix: ranked correction suggestions carried with receipts. A 163-site src/check.rs cascade, vigilia-gated to 8 of 8 spells converged, L1 + L2 = 0 across six remediation rounds. This is the apparatus the define rip and every later HARD CUT consumed.

src/function/ (stone 241.18a 4d9b963e). The fn parse/eval/infer code — five functions scattered across runtime.rs and check.rs — lifted into one home (function/eval.rs, function/parse.rs, function/infer.rs). Total HARD CUT, no back-compat re-exports; six pub(crate) promotions in check.rs paid for the move. A Phase-B vigilia of nine spells took it to L1 + L2 = 0 — the REMARKABLE bar — across seven rounds, and two of those rounds turned on a call from the user rather than a finding from a spell.

When a spell read the total HARD CUT with no re-exports as a lift-and-shift risk — the worry that moving code without a compatibility shim was a violation in itself — the user’s verdict cut straight past the procedure:

what matters is that our code works - if it’s more correct in this form and the entire test suite still passes - it’s by definition honest

And when an intueri finding offered a rune to wave through a solvable “non-blocking” assert-message, the line came back the other way:

runes are illegal if the path is solvable and it does not impair performance

A rune is for the genuinely unsolvable; a solvable finding gets fixed, not annotated. Along the way the grimoire gained a new spell, exigere (the drive-out of deferred-work language) — the codification of exactly that line — whose first cast caught two Level-1 findings no other spell surfaced.

Lib tests rose 834 → 890; clippy held in band at 897.

Fourteen stones, and underneath them one shape: defn is now the one definer, the legacy form-zoo is annihilated rather than deprecated, and the substrate that does the retiring also teaches the fix. One parser, one definer family, one metadata mechanism, no residue.

But the retirement is not inscribed. Stone 241.18a’s vigilia, surveying the new src/function/ home, surfaced a defect deeper than any single form: error types across the substrate could silently carry no source location — Rust’s type system has no opinion on “every error knows where it happened.” The call was the discipline the work has run on for months: a class is not patched; it is made structurally unavailable. So 241’s own guard spawned arc 243 to annihilate it — and by spawn-block winding, arc 241 cannot close until 243 does. The retirement stands complete and waits on the warding it called into being.

Tattoos → og-wat spec → holon-rs → wat-rs → BOOK.md → MEMORY.md → datamancy → one definer, the zoo emptied. The chain extends.

Likely Contributions to the Field

Retirement-with-receipts: a language that does not deprecate a retired form but HARD CUTs it and ships, in the same stone, a ranked “did you mean” correction engine (src/remedy/) — so the largest cascade (~271 sites) lands on a substrate that teaches what changed rather than one that merely rejects.
One definer, one metadata mechanism: the entire struct / enum / define / *-restricted / define-dispatch form-zoo collapsed into a single def* family carrying an optional binding-metadata map, read through one reflection verb — restriction, dispatch, and aliasing folded into data instead of bespoke forms.
The held line as design pressure: the no-privileged-path rule, correctness-makes-honesty over procedure, and runes-are-for-the-unsolvable are not after-the-fact rationalizations — they are calls made during the work that decided what shipped, and one of them (runes-for-the-unsolvable) became its own audit spell, exigere.

PERSEVERARE.