ai-app/docs/HANDOFF.md

Handoff

Where the work in flight stands for a session picking it up cold. Keep current invariants, measurements, and failed hypotheses here; this is not a decisions log.

Where things stand

Canonical Iris main is ca2b4b2 (#17, the headless rig). #18 split/18-position-chain is open in /home/bob/repos/iris-pr18; its local head is 4f5e27c, sixty-three commits. Built-in alignment is complete there; see "Built-in alignment" below for the retained-layout details. No PR reviews were present when checked on 2026-09-15.

The current head completes LAYOUT.md §2's position chain and the requested leftover behavior. A child whose length is only leftover is not drawn when nothing is left. A child that also asks for pixels or a relative fraction keeps that part and overflows as before.

29c7881 replaces the parallel resize rules with one retained-layout contract, Holds: the interval of box lengths for which a widget's drawing and reported size stay valid. Reading Painter::px_len or px_size narrows the interval to the length read; Painter::holds lets the widget widen it. Parent validity is the intersection of the ranges its children induce. This contract is trusted. A widget that declares an incorrect range is a defective widget; Iris does not add defensive work to recover optimizations from a false declaration.

f437495 restores explicit Span::ortho(OrthoSize::{Children, Full}) sizing. Children remains the default and preserves the old conservative behavior: the largest fixed orthogonal length is reported, while any relative or leftover child makes the span report leftover. Full reports exactly Len::rel(1.0). It does not read the children's orthogonal sizes, but their Holds ranges still propagate through final-box drawing, so a resize repositions them without redrawing when their own contracts permit it.

71c9c39 replaces the public Painter::place distinction with an opt-in widget property. .region_node() gives a widget one independently movable retained region; Widgets::set_region_node can change that choice at runtime and causes one structural redraw. Widgets without the property remain at the default shallow chain depth: Iris recursively remaps their retained primitive and mask regions when they move. .scrollable() enables a region node on its content once as its convenient default; raw Scroll::new respects the caller's choice, and the property can be disabled later without breaking scrolling. Span and Align do not add nodes to their children.

Do not change Children to select the pixel-longest arbitrary Len at the span's current width. A fixed child and a relative child can create multiple self-sizing fixed points; generated seed 13 settled differently warm and cold under that attempted implementation. A Holds interval says where an already chosen answer stays valid, but cannot make that circular choice unique.

The implementation also fixes three counterexamples found while finishing the rewrite:

• An asked-but-undrawn size dependency must name the widget that asked as its parent. Using the asker's parent skipped a reader and made generated seed 10 settle differently warm and cold.
• Scroll must return the answer from the first box it asked about, whether that answer came from a retained length or a fresh measurement. Returning the final placed answer only on the retained path advanced one fixed-point iteration and broke seed 86.
• A widget retains the layer it was entered on, not the last child layer its painter visited. The old value drifted on local redraw and put a redrawn tab background above its retained text.
• Span's leftover/no-leftover split is a strict layout decision, not a rounding tolerance. Its Holds range must use the same exact divided boundary as drawing; a tolerant endpoint retained zero-height children at the boundary in generated seed 16. 5ed9e87 moved that boundary rather than softening it, and 39e4ca2 removed the move: on the grid the box and the sum are the same count. See "Fixed point" below.

core/src/ui/holds.rs, the retained tests, and the generated cold-layout oracle pin those rules. Seeds 10 and 86 are now in the ordinary generated set.

Verification at 4f5e27c

• cargo fmt --all --check
• cargo build --workspace --all-features
• cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
• cargo test --workspace --all-features: 105 passed, 10 ignored
• The release generated cold-layout oracle passed 100 seeds in 9.4 s, and a shrinker case at 300 seeds in 3.5 s: both run a thread per core but one.
• The release shrinker passed all five cases -- resize, repaint, resize-repaint, reorder, size-change -- at 300 seeds of depth 5: 26,001 widgets per case, largest tree 331. It passed 1000 seeds of depth 6 (159,024 widgets per case, largest tree 587) at 5ed9e87, before fixed point; re-run that before quoting it again.
• tabs, view, minimal, text and random render byte-identical at 1920x1200 across the whole fixed-point sequence.
• tests/drift.rs passed its 20,000-move exactness check in release mode.
• The seeded random example, live-resized from 1920x1200 to 1280x800, is byte-identical to a cold 1280x800 render. Both PNGs hash to 1d397c57b9914a2e596fa907029bc6aab4629e4d74deb0715e81325c703bcdb3. The run used the Venus adapter backed by the host RX 7900 XT.
• minimal, text and view render byte-identical at 1920x1200 across 8220a78. tabs differs only in the widget count it prints about itself, which is two wrapper types smaller -- so it is no longer a byte-identical reference and the generated oracle is the check that matters.
• At preceding head 29c7881, reference renders against /home/bob/repos/iris-main-cmp at ca2b4b2 covered: tabs, view, minimal, and text at 1920x1200; tabs cold at 900x1200; live resize from 1920x1200 to 900x1200; and the tab interaction before and after replay. Every comparison had zero differing pixels. The live-resize image is also byte-identical to the cold 900x1200 image.

The built-in-alignment pre-submit review was run in four passes. It caught three distinctions the smaller tests had missed: an answer's validity must include the drawing made in its final placed box; a region-node box is resolved through its parent move rather than through its own move twice; and boxes with equal dimensions but different positions still need the parent that placed them. The 100-seed oracle and both 300-seed shrink cases pass after those fixes. The earlier region-node review caught an index-reuse hazard when removing a node; its move entry now remains alive until every descendant has migrated. The generated oracle then exposed the exact Span threshold described above. The earlier retained-layout review caught the layer defect above, corrected validity-range inversion for negative relative extents, and removed an impossible-state unwrap from Scroll. The orthogonal-sizing review caught both the circular longest-child choice and the incompatible visual effect of making Full the default.

Performance

Measured 2026-09-16 on the release layout_diagnostics fixture, seed 1, depth 8, 500 frames, as median milliseconds a frame. 5ed9e87 is the commit before fixed point; 39e4ca2 is fixed point complete.

phase	5ed9e87	39e4ca2	4f5e27c
many	0.179 ms	0.544	0.274
resize	0.020	0.035	0.033
scroll	0.011	0.030	0.019
repaint	0.012	0.031	0.021

Fixed point cost 3x, and two thirds of that was not the grid. The counters said eight more "placed by redrawing" a frame in scroll, all of them "reuse: another layer": a retained drawing belongs to the layer it was made on, and Stack measured the child that sizes it on its own layer before drawing it again on the child layer. 97cc8b3 measures on the layer the child ends up on, which puts the scroll phase's counters back exactly where they were -- 4 widget draws, 12 draw requests.

What is left is per-operation cost, not more work: the many phase does 125 widget draws against 121 before, and takes 1.5x as long. The arithmetic is the difference -- an i64 multiply and a rounding branch where there was an f32 multiply, and an i64 division in the remap. Three were taken out after measuring (11c55bc, 4f5e27c, and halving the divisions in Holds::through); RegionRemap::apply_span is still a fifth of the phase, and the rest is spread thin. Measure with perf stat -e instructions:u rather than the clock, which varies 2x here.

One thing tried and reverted, recorded so it is not tried again: short- circuiting apply_scalar where the fraction is nought or one. Those are not the common cases, and the comparisons cost 17% more than the divisions they saved.

Earlier, against #18's own history: the retained rewrite took many from 25.17M instructions a frame at 691e3eb to 6.14M at 29c7881, and resize from 16.08M to 8.39M. That fixture has since changed; do not compare across it.

Retained-layout invariants

• A retained drawing belongs to the layer it was made on. Asked for again on another layer it is redrawn, since nothing about its geometry says it is in a list that paints at a different moment. A container that measures a child by drawing it therefore measures on the layer that child will draw on -- Painter::child_layer_at addresses one -- or it pays two draws a frame forever and keeps whichever the second ask left.

• A widget that clips its contents to its box reports its box: Scroll and Masked both report LEFTOVER, and a debug_assert in draw_at holds any widget that set a mask to it. Overflowing is otherwise ordinary and a text too tall for its box says so.

• A span is as long across itself as its longest child, unless a rule beside it says how long it is -- and then it does not read its children there at all, since the answer is not wanted and reading one is what makes its size depend on it. OrthoSize was that second case written twice and is gone (9d8415d); Painter::ruled is how a container asks which it is in, and the only thing a widget may learn about a rule over it.

• A region node holds a whole UiRegion in its parent node's coordinates. UiRegion::FULL is the identity. Widgets opt in with .region_node() or Widgets::set_region_node; ordinary widgets share the nearest ancestor node. Region nodes therefore add chain depth only where moving a whole subtree through one entry is useful.

• A widget's ActiveData::region is its box in its parent node. A region-node widget draws in FULL; its box lives in its node. Moving an ordinary retained subtree instead remaps its primitive, mask, and active regions. Remapping stops at a descendant region node after rewriting that one entry.

• Changing region_node redraws the subtree once to rebuild the coordinate boundary. The property belongs to widget identity, which is safe because a widget has one parent. .scrollable() sets it once; raw Scroll::new does not, and Scroll never reasserts it while drawing.

• The first box a parent asks about is the offer. A later box chosen from the child's answer is the final box, not another independent answer. Dirty widgets are re-asked at the offer and only then drawn in the final box. An offer composes through its ancestors' offers, not through their current placed boxes.

• An answer is reusable only where both its measurement and the drawing made in its final placed box remain valid. The final drawing's Holds interval is translated back into lengths of the offered box and intersected with the answer's interval.

• Equal box lengths do not imply equal placement. An ordinary widget whose offered and current boxes differ in position must involve its parent again; a region node can settle itself only when its own alignment, rather than a container override, determines the final box.

• A retained drawing can be reused only when its Holds interval contains the new pixel box on both axes, its parent node is unchanged, its region-node choice matches the retained structure, and the widget is clean. A valid ordinary subtree may move without redrawing because its regions are recursively remapped.

• Painter records size-dependency edges only when a parent reads a child's size or hint. An undrawn measured child remains recorded so a later change reaches the parent that decided whether to draw it.

• Dirty widgets settle deepest-first. dirty_size_under prevents a reader from taking a retained answer while something below that answer is still dirty; the walk is an optimization against laying out twice, not a second validity mechanism.

• Declared non-leftover lengths are resolved by the widget's parent where the widget is drawn. A declared-length change therefore redraws the parent.

• A pixel comparison is equality: lengths are whole counts of 1/1024 px, so a change too small to reach the next step is not a change and one that reaches it is, however little of a pixel it is worth.

• Text shaping is retained separately from line breaking. A greedy line break remains valid from its longest produced line through the width at which it was made, and TextView reports that interval through Painter::holds.

• Span's decision to distribute leftover is a pixel question. The room to divide is len * fixed - total.px; pure leftover children are undrawn where there is none. The box a parent hands back and the sum of what the children asked for are counts of the same step, so the boundary needs no margin and the validity interval is split exactly at it.

• Scroll reports its content's first measured size. Its drawing can survive container-length changes only over the interval in which clamping and its current offset do not change.

• A move that keeps a box's length is a translation, and an offset is exact on the grid. A box that also changed length has to re-express each part as a fraction of the new one, and that division and multiplication round: 39e4ca2 translates where from.len() == to.len() and scales only where it must, which is what made the shrinker's resize case agree exactly. This inverts the float-era rule, and the measurements behind that rule are why tests/drift.rs exists: in floats, offsetting both ends of a span shortened that fixture's row by 0.071 px over 20,000 moves and 0.712 over 200,000, while re-expressing fractions stayed exact. 20,000 moves is five minutes of scrolling at 60Hz. On the grid the drift is gone either way, and tests/drift.rs pins that it stays gone.

Built-in alignment

Committed as d3b0ebf in /home/bob/repos/iris-pr18.

What is in it: align is a widget property beside region_node and the size rule, Aligned is deleted, .align()/.center() set the property, and the fuzzer covers size rules, alignment and region nodes and changes all three at runtime. Region nodes had no generated coverage at all before that.

Alignment is two fractions, not four directions

Decided 2026-09-15 (Bryan). A widget's alignment is one f32 per axis, so a quarter of the way along an axis is expressible. AxisAlign's three familiar positions are named constants over that number, which is what every expression already uses: the layout math only ever reads AxisAlign::rel(), so nothing downstream changes shape.

The default is the middle on both axes, because the two edges are the ones that assume a direction -- which edge is the near one depends on the writing system and on which way a container runs. "Near edge" throughout this document means the start of the box in the box's own orientation, which for a reversed span is its visually far end, not "top left".

Placement cannot be applied after the fact

Do not re-attempt "draw the widget, then move its drawing to where its alignment says". Three attempts failed, and the reason is structural: the move is a change of coordinate frame, and no consistent split of the stored state carries it.

• Move ActiveData::region with the drawing, and a later local redraw asks a differently rounded question. Measured: (0,0)..(0,305.936) re-expressed as (0.5,-81.5)..(0.5,224.436) reads its length back as 305.93604, which crosses Span's leftover/no-leftover boundary -- the one that must be exact -- and draws a child a cold layout leaves undrawn.
• Leave region alone, and placed accumulates without bound, because try_reuse returns a clean subtree's size without walking into it: only the top widget's placed is recomputed while an ancestor's shift carries the whole subtree. Measured 7,048,813 where a cold layout says 456.

The replacement applies alignment in the two places that already exist and are exact. Where the size is known before drawing, from a rule, declared_box hands the child its aligned box directly -- one draw, no move. Where the size is only known after drawing, the widget is re-asked in its placed box, with its alignment forced to the near edge on the second ask so it terminates; that ask goes through try_reuse, which moves by recomposing, which tests/drift.rs pins as exact. That deletes ActiveData::placed and shift_subtree. The cost is a second ask for a measured widget that is not near-aligned, which is exactly what Aligned cost before this work.

Placement compounds, which is what the align override is for

A container that reports a child's size while handing that child a bigger box gets its content placed twice: once by the child, once by the box around it. Found three times before the class was fixed rather than the instances -- Stack::size(Child(i)), Scroll's orthogonal axis, and Pad.

Painter::widget_aligned(child, region, align) is the override: an Option<RegionAlign> carried in DrawInfo and resolved once in draw_inner, so the root resolves like anything else. Pad, Stack and Scroll pass the near edge for children whose size they report. ActiveData keeps both the resolved alignment, so a local redraw asks the question its parent asked, and the widget's own, which is what a change is compared against -- an override means the answer is the parent's to give again.

A widget occupies its box, and must not report more than it draws

Scroll reports Size::LEFTOVER on both axes: it clips its content to its box, so it can neither take less of one nor honestly ask for more. The content's length is what it scrolls through, not what it is. Reporting the content length instead made the framework place a 400-long drawing in a 200-long box, and placement by recomposition scales in that case, because a part stored at fraction 2 of its box stays at fraction 2 of a box twice as long. Reporting the content's cross length had the box around it place content already placed.

Where content shorter than the viewport sits is now Scroll's own alignment. Its Holds widening -- "content of a fixed length that fits sits at the start of any box it fits in" -- is therefore gated on near alignment: anchored anywhere else it is a part of the room left over, so it moves with every length the box takes and the drawing holds for that length alone.

Stack gives every child the box its sizing child defines, through the new Painter::box_of, for the same reason.

A debug_assert that a reported non-leftover size does not exceed the box it drew in would have caught both immediately, and is still worth adding.

Fixed point

Layout decides on a grid rather than in floats, in four commits: 7548139 the number, 4e28f10 positions, bd6de71 lengths, 39e4ca2 the last of the pixels and Holds. Decided with Bryan on 2026-09-15.

• Fixed<SHIFT> is an i32 counting 1 / 2^SHIFT. Adding and subtracting are exact; a multiply or a conversion rounds once, back onto the same steps. Two routes to one place that come within half a step land on the same number, so everything downstream compares for equality.
• Px is 1/1024 px, Rel is 1/2^24 of a box, Weight is 1/65536 of a share. PX_SHIFT and REL_SHIFT are the only statement of the first two, and the shader's copy is prepended from them by render::module_source rather than written again in WGSL.
• A weight is not a fraction: a list divides its room by the total of its weights, so Weight trades precision for the range to hold a whole list, and Rel::ratio turns two weights into a share on the finer grid.
• Arithmetic saturates rather than wrapping, because a clamped coordinate keeps the ordering a wrapped one inverts.
• Px was 1/64 first. The residue of a length reached two ways is one rounding, so it scales with the step: at 1/64 that was 0.016 px, enough to move a box, and at 1/1024 it is a thousandth of a pixel. Range is +/-2.1M px and conversion to f32 is exact to 16,384 px.
• What the fuzzers ask for is a step per level of nesting, which is two for these trees. Traced on 2026-09-16 to the same box reached two ways, each rounding where the other does not -- not accumulation, and not one place. Two of them are fixed in bdab558:
  • Scroll wrote a box it had been given back out as its own length in pixels. Centring a part in rel 1 lands a step from centring it in px 900, because a(x - y) and ax - ay do not round alike. Content that fills the viewport unscrolled is handed back as it came, and the repaint and resize-repaint cases became exact.
  • Span placed each child a step from where the last ended, carrying every share's rounding along the row. A position is now the fixed parts before it, exact, plus one rounded share. Two hundred equal shares of a 1000 px row ended at 999.999 and now end at 1000. What is left is a box centred in a fraction of its parent against the same box centred in its own pixels, one step per level between them. Closing it means alignment resolved in pixels everywhere -- which costs the retained resize path, since it is the fractional form that re-centres a subtree without redrawing it. Not worth it at a thousandth of a pixel.
• Holds::through inverts px + rel * box, which rounds, so the answer is an interval even for a single length. It maps the half step either side, plus one more for the two ways above; inverting the length alone gives a point that need not contain the box the part was drawn in.
• A pointer, a wheel notch, a shaped glyph advance and a window size arrive as floats and are put on the grid where they arrive. Vec2 stays what the GPU and the platform speak; PxVec2 is what layout decides in.

The leftover boundary

Fixed in 5ed9e87, which closed the shrinker's reorder case. Neither of its two red seeds was about reordering.

A span's box in pixels, compared with what its fixed and relative children fill, is the same number whenever the parent sized that box from the span's own answer -- and the box comes back through the chain a few bits off. So 0.00003 px decided whether a leftover-only child existed: warm rounded under and left it undrawn, cold rounded over and drew it at zero length. Both layouts are stable and the pixels are identical either way, which is why only the warm-against-cold oracle could see it.

A structural decision may not be taken where boxes structurally land. The fix is not a tolerant comparison -- that is what generated seed 16 punished -- but a boundary moved by HOLDS_EPSILON_PX of room, with the validity range split exactly at the moved boundary. What it gives up is a share of under a twentieth of a pixel. tests/unsettled.rs's a_box_that_only_rounds_past_its_fixed_children_leaves_nothing_over is the six-widget regression, shrunk from 266; it needs the span above the one that divides, because without a box composed through it both trees round the same way.

Scroll's content_len <= container_len sits on the same coincidence but is continuous there -- it chooses between two Holds ranges that both contain the current length, so a rounding difference costs a redraw rather than a different layout. Checked while fixing this; nothing else reads a box in pixels to decide something structural.

Rigs and reproduction

Ordinary framework verification:

cd /home/bob/repos/iris-pr18
cargo fmt --all --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace

cb955f1 put the ordinary tests in tests/cases/, as modules of one tests/suite.rs target -- eleven links became one, and with profile.test's debug = "line-tables-only" a rebuild of iris's test targets went from 14.3 s to 7.7 s and target/ from 45 GB to 13 GB. Pick a module out with cargo test --test suite layout::. The fuzzers and the *_cost measurements are still their own targets.

The fuzzers take a thread per core but one (9d8415d), since a seed grows, lays out and drops its tree alone: the oracle's hundred seeds went from 68 s to 9.4 s and a shrinker case at 300 seeds from 18 s to 3.5 s. A failing seed still shrinks and panics on its own thread.

Run the long generated oracle only after ordinary tests pass:

cargo test --release --test generated -- --ignored a_long_run_of_seeds_agrees

tests/generated.rs compares a warm incremental tree with a cold tree of the same state. IRIS_GENERATED_SEED, IRIS_GENERATED_SEEDS, and IRIS_GENERATED_DEPTH select failures. tests/shrink.rs reduces a failing tree; use it to turn a seed into a readable regression rather than leaving the seed as the only record.

The headless reference set must be run one process at a time because the rig reuses one compositor. Comparison worktrees need separate target directories. Useful commands:

./scripts/run-headless.sh tabs --mode 1920x1200@60Hz --shot /tmp/tabs.png
./scripts/run-headless.sh tabs --mode 900x1200@60Hz --shot /tmp/cold.png
./scripts/run-headless.sh tabs --mode 1920x1200@60Hz \
  --resize 900x1200@60Hz --shot /tmp/resized.png
./scripts/run-headless.sh tabs --mode 1920x1200@60Hz \
  --replay /tmp/tabs.touch --shot /tmp/replay.png

The replay used for the final check was:

0 down 1728 24
80 up 1728 24
400 down 1836 1116
480 up 1836 1116
800 down 1836 1116
880 up 1836 1116

tests/layout_diagnostics.rs is the retained CPU rig. Select cold, many, repaint, size, scroll, or resize with IRIS_PHASE; use the feature for explanatory counters and an uninstrumented release binary under perf for instruction totals.

Next

The next small LAYOUT.md §2 item is LazySpan. Region nodes now cover the independently movable-subtree use case; do not restore a separate child-placement API. docs/LAYOUT.md §2 is stale: it still describes Painter::place, which 71c9c39 replaced.

Built-in alignment and size goes on #18 rather than after it (Bryan, 2026-09-15: #18 is unreviewed and already large enough that most lines get read anyway). The size half landed as 8220a78, the alignment half as d3b0ebf.

Do not restore OnResize::Translate; retained translation is now expressed by the same Holds contract and box chain.

Queued from this work, in order:

• Painter::glyphs converts four f32s to Px per glyph, every frame that draws it. A GlyphEntry holding Px would convert once, when the glyph is rasterised. It is the largest single thing left in the layout profile after InstanceList::push.

• Scroll should take a direction rather than one axis: vertical, horizontal, or both. Reporting LEFTOVER on both axes is already the right shape for it.

• Restore max_width/max_height as SizeRule::{Min, Max, Clamp}. 8220a78 deleted MaxSize and its builders, so that is public API owed back. A clamp resolved where the box is decided also fixes MaxSize's reading of px_size, which pinned its interval to one exact box on both axes and redrew its whole subtree on any resize. The clamp boundary is a hard layout decision: its Holds range must be exact and split at the crossover, the way generated seed 16 taught for Span. On the grid the crossover no longer needs moving off where boxes land -- see "Fixed point" -- but it does need both sides of the comparison to be Px.

Other queued work, in dependency order:

• UiRenderState behind Rc<RefCell<_>>.
• Split Len/layout length and add density-independent pixels.
• Input restructuring: pointer capture, drag slop and axis, cancellation, mask-aware hit testing, and timestamps.
• Retained paints, selection, overlays, and shared runtime state.
• Generic desktop/Android hosts and reusable example/APK tooling.
• Application-owned fonts and replaceable glyph-atlas buckets.
• Positioned text overflow and cluster-safe ellipsis.

The archive is a reference, not a patch: it predates returned Size, the current box chain, and the current length types. Recreate changes on current types and keep app/session concepts out of Iris.