Skip to content

Admitting records

2026-07-14

For months the ledger said:

Structs / records — Kora Night uses parallel lists… Recorded, not admitted.

Today they are admitted. This post is the paper trail.

The pain

KORA on lantern bakes world data into main.wick. Kitchen props looked like:

let kitchen_prop: list<num> = []
let kitchen_px: list<num> = []
let kitchen_py: list<num> = []
let kitchen_pw: list<num> = []
let kitchen_ph: list<num> = []
// draw: prop_tex[kitchen_prop[i]] at (kitchen_px[i], kitchen_py[i], ...)

Five lists, one logical entity. Index drift is a class of bug you only find when a broom draws at the hearth position. Lantern Night's four lamps still fit parallel lists; eighteen kitchen props did not.

Baking could not fix this: the runtime model was wrong, not the authoring pipeline.

The smallest language that helps

We did not add:

  • classes, methods, inheritance
  • nested records or list fields
  • optional fields or defaults
  • pattern matching

We added:

record Prop {
  slot: num
  x: num
  y: num
  w: num
  h: num
}

let kitchen_props: list<Prop> = []
push(kitchen_props, Prop { slot: 21, x: 320, y: 208, w: 87, h: 96 })
// ...
props[i].x
props[i].y = props[i].y + 1

Flat fields only (num / bool / str). Named construction, all fields required. Field get/set, including on list elements. ~opcodes OP_REC, OP_FGET, OP_FSET in the existing stack VM.

Evidence rule, applied

Question Answer
Is there real game code that hurts? Yes — KORA kitchen props
Is there a clean static workaround? No — data is already baked; the runtime shape is the issue
Smallest fix? Flat records + list<record>
Did we update tests + docs in the same change? Yes

Lantern Night lamps were not a reason to admit records. Four parallel lists are readable. The constitution is not “make every table a record.”

What stays out

Closures, modules, and string indexing still wait on scars. Records do not unlock them. If your proposal is “now that we have records, we should have methods,” the answer is still: show the game code that dies without them.

WickA Famemu projectLantern source