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Building Burroughs

11. Guest-started threads

A dated record

A dated record, written 2026-10-29. It is not updated as the project moves; the docs track the current release.

Drafted 2026-10-29 from the v0.12.0 tag, its CHANGELOG.md block, and the contract at that tag. Issue states are as read on that day and will move. Corrections welcome.

Post 10 described v0.12.0 as the next milestone, built around #1122 and Scott's goal: "Go->Wasm->Burroughs runs a Go program in all its glory on an engine that can." It shipped on 2026-10-28, the date of its CHANGELOG.md block (the tag itself is dated 2026-10-27 in Pacific time). The tag message names both halves: "guest-started threads, and four Wasm 3.0 proposals on by default."

6. A battery that grades itself

A dated record

A dated record, written 2026-10-26. It is not updated as the project moves; the docs track the current release.

Drafted 2026-10-26 from the repository's records. Corrections welcome.

The oracle problem

In v0, every green had an outside judge. The upstream spec suite was written by people who had never heard of Burroughs, and it could disagree with the engine. That is contract §0's neutrality guarantee.

8. Three hangs and a witness that lied

A dated record

A dated record, written 2026-10-26. It is not updated as the project moves; the docs track the current release.

Drafted 2026-10-26 from the repository's records. Corrections welcome.

Concurrent code produces a particular kind of evidence: one red run in a few hundred, which doesn't come back when you re-run it. The cheap response is to push again and read the green as a refutation. Burroughs has a law against that ("A re-run green doesn't refute a fail — explaining the fail does"), and in the last week of October three investigations showed why.

9. The flip and the correction

A dated record

A dated record, written 2026-10-26. It is not updated as the project moves; the docs track the current release.

Drafted 2026-10-26 from the repository's records. Corrections welcome.

A condition, quoted

For most of the threads phase, gate:threads sat behind a condition Scott had set, which the brief quoted word for word: the default flips when #586 is resolved and the §4 battery covers what the default would then promise. The brief adds that "is a condition, not a deferral — the difference being that a reader can check whether it holds."

10. What's next

A dated record

A dated record, written 2026-10-29. It is not updated as the project moves; the docs track the current release.

Drafted 2026-10-26 from the repository's records, and revised 2026-10-29 after v0.12.0 shipped: its section is cut down to a pointer to post 11, and the sentences v0.12.0 overtook are changed. Issue states are as read on the day each says and will move. Corrections welcome.

v0.12.0, shipped

When this post was drafted, the next milestone was v0.12.0 guest-started threads, built around #1122 and Scott's goal that "Go->Wasm->Burroughs runs a Go program in all its glory on an engine that can." It shipped on 2026-10-28, and post 11 covers what it delivered and what it did not.

5. Threads without a bell

A dated record

A dated record, written 2026-10-26. It is not updated as the project moves; the docs track the current release.

Drafted 2026-10-26 from the repository's records. Corrections welcome.

The phase changes, quietly

v0.4.0 (2026-08-28) closed v0, and its release note said firmly: "it is not v1. … v0 closing means v0's conditions are discharged, not that the next phase has begun." That was true when written: none of the §§2–5 threads work had started. Two days later it had.

4. The process that built itself, and the pruning

A dated record

A dated record, written 2026-10-26. It is not updated as the project moves; the docs track the current release.

Drafted 2026-10-26 from the repository's records. Corrections welcome.

Post 3 described the governance machinery at its best. This one is about its tendency to grow. Every grave produced a law, every law could fail, and every way a law could fail looked like it needed a control. Left alone, a process built on "check the checker" will happily spend its time checking.

3. Graves, stamps and laws

A dated record

A dated record, written 2026-10-26. It is not updated as the project moves; the docs track the current release.

Drafted 2026-10-26 from the repository's records. Corrections welcome.

Most of Burroughs' record is not code. On 2026-10-26 the tree held 106 decision records, eleven "law" families of about 5,600 lines, and a changelog of about 19,500 lines. The tracker held 168 issues labelled type:grave, plus 4 PRs carrying the same label. This post is about why an engine project produced that much text. Some of it is very good practice. Some of it, as the next post shows, got out of hand.