Style guide

Reference material, synced from the compiler repo’s spec/. The guide is the gentler path in.

This document specifies idiomatic Hale in four layers: the shapes a program is composed of, the correctness rules that keep a long-lived program sound, the speed rules that make a hot path allocation-free, and the enforcement ladder the compiler backs them with. Where grammar.ebnf says what’s syntactically valid and types.md / semantics.md say what’s meaningfully valid, this document says what’s idiomatically valid — what a program should look like when an author has applied the framework’s primitives coherently rather than fought them.

Every rule here is grounded in production Hale code — the pond contrib libraries, the causality game engine, a production market-data connector fleet, the bench performance corpus, and a downstream market-data service whose leak hunts drove much of the substrate’s reclamation machinery. Rules cite the shape that earned them.

The styleguide is normative for new code in apps/, the bundled stdlib seed (crates/hale-codegen/runtime/stdlib/), and examples/. It is descriptive for older code that predates a given rule; refactors apply the rules opportunistically.

How to read it: Foundations and the shape catalog get a program structured right. Correctness keeps it right over days of uptime. Fast applies only where a path is genuinely hot — the section says so explicitly. Enforcement is the one-table summary of what the compiler checks for you.

Every named structural thing is a locus. Types are loci-in-waiting — the smallest growth stage on the locus gradient.

If a thing has lifecycle, contracts, bus participation, modes, closures, capacity slots, or projection class, it is a fully-grown locus. If it is pure data (record, returnable by value, no flow), it is a type. The two are points on one gradient, not separate categories. There is no third primitive. See notes/hale-types-vs-loci.md for the source axiom.

Loci recur at every layer: an app is a locus, a service is a locus, a spawned worker is a locus, a cache is a locus. There is no module / class / package keyword because none is needed — anything one of those would do, a locus does, and the locus carries lifecycle and contracts the other forms don’t.

Only two declaration forms exist: locus and main locus. “App”, “service”, “namespace”, “child”, “collection” are roles a locus plays, realized through which members it declares — params / lifecycle / bus / accept / capacity — not through separate keywords. Don’t hunt the grammar for a service or module keyword; pick the role from the catalog below and declare the members that realize it. (Production confirmation: the connector fleet and causality together define every role in the catalog using exactly the two forms.)

This is the single most load-bearing page in the guide. A developer who gets every shape right and skips this page will still ship a leak — that is an observed outcome, not a hypothetical.

Arenas don’t free per-allocation. Every locus owns an arena (self.__arena). Everything anchored there — struct clones, String buffers, child structures — lives until the locus dissolves. There is no per-object free.

Method scratch reclaims at method exit. Every allocating method (and bus handler) gets a scratch region created at entry and destroyed at return. Transients — parse results, temporaries, locals — allocate into scratch and vanish per call. This is why ordinary code is allocation-bounded by construction: allocate freely in a method, and the method boundary cleans up.

Escaping a value costs an anchor. Storing a heap value into self copies it out of scratch into the locus arena (an “anchor”). The anchor is the transfer of lifetime: the value now lives as long as the locus.

Therefore: a long-lived locus means anything anchored per-iteration accumulates until dissolve — unless one of the substrate’s reclamation mechanisms applies. The mechanisms, in the order you should reach for them:

1. Don’t escape. Keep transients in method scratch. Free by construction.
2. Mutate in place. self.f.x = v, self.arr[i] = v, String/Bytes reassign that fits the existing buffer — all reuse existing storage, zero new bytes.
3. Replace and let it retire. self.f = Struct { ... } whole-value replace memcpys the struct bytes in place, and — since v0.11.3 — retires the replaced String clones at the method’s activation boundary, recycling them on the next store. Steady-state replace of a scalar/String struct holds the arena flat. (Structs carrying Bytes / nested compound fields aren’t fully retired yet — see §7.)
4. Bound the container. capacity slots, bounded[T; N], @form(ring_buffer) / @form(lru_cache) are cap-bounded by type.
5. Give it to a child. An accept’d child locus owns its own arena, reclaimed when the child ends — the per-connection shape (see rule C4).
6. Send it. Bus payloads ride a per-dispatch arena, reclaimed after delivery.

One structural consequence to internalize: a run() loop is a single never-ending activation. Nothing scratch-based reclaims inside it, and pending retires never flush. Hot per-iteration work belongs in a method called from the loop — the method boundary is the reclaim point. (This is why every churn example in this guide runs its body through a method.)

Seven idiomatic shapes. Every locus or free fn in a well-written program matches one; code that doesn’t should be reconsidered against the catalog before shipping.

Every app’s main.hl defines a top-level locus that owns the whole run; fn main() reads argv, instantiates it, exits.

locus Onboard {
    params { dir: String = "fixture"; flavor: String = "go"; }
    run() { drive(self.dir, self.flavor); }
}

fn main() {
    let mut dir = "fixture";
    if std::env::args_count() > 1 { dir = std::env::arg(1); }
    Onboard { dir: dir };
}

• params holds argv-derived configuration with defaults (the app self-demos with no flags).
• Statement-position literals fire-and-forget: the locus runs and dissolves at fn-return.
• Lifecycle bodies reject return — factor short-circuit logic into a free helper called from run().

A coherent vocabulary of pure helpers wrapped in a locus with empty (or config-only) params { }. The language’s substitute for “module of functions” / “static class”.

locus Morpheme {
    params { flavor: String = "go"; }
    fn lookup_morpheme(m: String) -> String { ... }
    fn name_to_motion(name: String) -> String {
        let hit = self.lookup_morpheme(name);
        ...
    }
}

Config-only params are fine; the point is no lifecycle state. Promote three-plus related free fns into one of these when the vocabulary becomes visible; leave unrelated helpers as free fns (a “util” namespace of strangers is an anti-pattern).

The full lifecycle for a thing that genuinely runs over time.

locus Listener {
    params {
        host: String = "127.0.0.1";
        port: Int = 0;
        listen_fd: Int = -1;
        on_connection: fn(std::io::tcp::Stream) = default_on_connection;
    }
    birth() {
        self.listen_fd =
            std::io::tcp::listen_socket(self.host, self.port) or raise;
    }
    run() { ...accept loop... }
    dissolve() { std::io::tcp::close_fd(self.listen_fd); }
}

• birth() acquires, dissolve() releases, run() loops.
• Sentinel params (-1 for “not yet bound”) let dissolve() no-op safely on partially-constructed loci; make close idempotent.
• A service that accepts children long-term needs the accept/release pairing — rule C4.

A let-bound locus literal lives for the fn body and dissolves at scope exit (the m82 dissolve-timing rule).

fn handle_one_connection(conn_fd: Int, on_conn: fn(std::io::tcp::Stream)) {
    let s = std::io::tcp::Stream { conn_fd: conn_fd, owns_fd: false };
    on_conn(s);
}

• Let-bind when the locus should live for the fn’s duration; statement-position literals dissolve at end of expression.
• Mind fd ownership: Stream defaults owns_fd: true and closes its fd at dissolve. A transient Stream wrapped around a fd someone else owns (a pooled connection, an accepted raw fd) must say owns_fd: false, or the wrapper’s scope exit closes the connection out from under the owner — a bug found in production twice (pond pq and keepalive both hit it).

Keyed or growable data lives in a @form(hashmap) / @form(vec) locus. The idiomatic wrapper is thin domain methods over the form’s synthesized surface — a facade that names the operations in the domain’s vocabulary:

type Sig { key: Int = 0; px: Decimal = 0.0d; seq: Int = 0; }

@form(vec)
locus SigRows { capacity { heap rows of Sig; } }

locus SigList {
    params { rows: SigRows = SigRows { }; }
    fn append(s: Sig) { self.rows.push(s); }
    fn count() -> Int { return self.rows.len(); }
    fn at(i: Int) -> Sig { return self.rows.get(i) or Sig { }; }
}

The form locus carries the synthesized surface (push / get / set / len / …); the facade holds it as a field and names the domain operations. (Domain methods directly on the form locus also work; the two-locus split keeps the form swappable and the facade’s methods flush-friendly.)

This shape recurs across every production codebase surveyed (a downstream service defines it four times; pond and bench pervasively). Conventions learned there:

• Cell types must be unqualified in-seed structs — not loci, not qualified paths (F.1 constraint; forces cell decls into the same seed).
• @form(hashmap) iterates in bucket order — add a seq: Int field if consumers need insertion order.
• @form(hashmap) has no delete — model removal with a tombstone field (present: Bool), the production idiom.
• Scalar [T; N] fixed arrays are the zero-alloc alternative when the population is fixed: causality runs its whole game state on SoA fixed arrays and uses zero @form loci.

When the question is is this present rather than what is stored here, use @form(set). It is the hashmap slot and runtime with a different surface:

type Item { key: String; }

@form(set)
locus Seen { capacity { pool items of Item indexed_by key; } }

insert(v) / contains(k) -> Bool / remove(k) / len() / is_empty().

The reason not to reach for @form(hashmap) with a throwaway value: membership then reads get(k) or false at every call site — the value plumbing leaking back out of a container whose value nobody wants. Sync disciplines work identically (@form(set, sync = striped)).

type Request { method: String; path: String; body: String; }

Returnable by value; no lifecycle. Types may hold fn(...) fields. If methods accumulate on a concept, it has flow — it wanted to be a locus.

Key material, a token, anything the rest of the program must never hold. The shape is not an analysis; it is the ownership model doing its job with one word added.

@sealed locus Signer {
    params { env_var: String = "SIGNING_KEY"; key: Bytes = b""; }

    birth() { self.key = std::bytes::from_string(std::env::var(self.env_var)); }

    fn ready() -> Bool { return len(self.key) > 0; }

    @effects(is: { secret_use })
    fn sign(m: Bytes) -> Bytes {
        if !self.ready() { return b""; }
        return std::crypto::hmac_sha256(self.key, m);
    }
}

Four rules, each load-bearing:

• @sealed. Loci are otherwise not field-encapsulated — self.signer.key typechecks from anywhere holding the locus — so this is what makes “the key never leaves its owner” a fact the compiler knows rather than one you verify by reading. It covers reads and writes: a locus whose state can be replaced from outside lets a caller choose the key.
• Take the NAME of a source, not the bytes. env_var: / key_file:, loaded in birth. Param initialization is deliberately unrestricted — a parent writing Signer { key: … } already holds what it passes — so material arriving as a constructor argument means some line of the application held it. Make birth the only writer, including the no-source case; otherwise a caller can seed it regardless.
• Refuse when unavailable. Every privileged method must consult ready(). A signer that computes under an empty key returns a MAC anyone can forge.
• Classify the one privileged method with secret_use, so the law can find it.

A sealed locus may not also carry contract { expose … }: sealing denies every external read, so the expose grants nothing, and the pair is rejected rather than left to read as permission. Callers use the locus’s methods.

Then the application states its own rule with claim forms that already exist:

claims {
    no_plugin_secrets: forbid reaches(plugins, effects(secret_use));
    one_op_per_request: bound secret_use <= 1 on paths from handlers;
    vault_confined: require sealed(all vaults);
}

Prefer std::secret::Signer / Credential to writing your own. Write your own when the operation is neither HMAC nor credential comparison, and keep it small enough to read: the sealed locus’s own body is trusted, which is the assumption the shape rests on.

This is confinement, not information flow. A signature derived from the key is not tracked, and a constant-time compare still lets the verdict be published.

A locus method that catches a fallible call’s error and decides between recovery (substitute a value) and escalation (drain and notify the parent) pairs an or self.method(err) clause with an epoch inline closure:

locus DbConnection {
    params { conn_fd: Int = -1; last_error: String = ""; }
    bus { subscribe ExecuteQuery as on_query; publish QueryResult; }

    closure fatal_io { captures: last_error; epoch inline; }

    fn handle_io(e: DbError) -> Row {
        self.last_error = e.detail;
        if e.kind == "send_failed" { violate fatal_io; }
        return Row { data: "" };
    }

    fn on_query(q: Query) {
        let r = send_query(self.conn_fd, q) or self.handle_io(err);
        if !self.draining { QueryResult <- r; }
    }
}

• The error-check fn is the one named site owning both the audit-state update and the escalation choice.
• violate NAME; diverges: the runtime synthesizes a ClosureViolation, sets draining, routes to the parent’s on_failure. Guard downstream sends with if !self.draining.
• The two-channel rule: substrate-facing surfaces (lifecycle, modes, closure assertions, bus handlers) cannot declare fallible(E); user-declared fn members and free fns can. See spec/decisions.md F.27.
• Loci whose methods can’t return through the value channel use the last_error scratch convention: last_error / last_kind / last_errno fields the caller reads after a sentinel return (pond logfmt’s file sink is the reference shape).

Library exports: pick short lowercase import aliases; name decls to read naturally under the alias (fin::Quote, not fin::FinQuote). See spec/projects.md for the seed model.

spec/styleguide.md is the most prescriptive file in the repo, and until 2026-08-03 nothing checked a line of it. That is how §7 came to assert that a generic payload enum “compiles, constructs, and matches today” when it does not construct — the claim was written once and never executed again.

Two gates now run in the normal suite:

• Snippets. Every hale block must parse *and typecheck*. Partial sketches opt out with hale,fragment; deliberately-wrong anti-patterns use ```hale,counter, so a reader of the source can tell “incomplete” from “wrong on purpose”. (hale-types/tests/styleguide_snippets.rs)
• Claims. §7’s assertions about what the language does not do are pinned as tests. Absence is the thing nobody re-tests, so when a gap closes the prose keeps saying it is open. If one of these changes, the test fails and names the entry to update. (same file, plus hale-cli/tests/styleguide_claims.rs for the claims that are codegen limits rather than typecheck limits — a split worth knowing, because those are invisible to hale check.)

If you add a claim about the language here, add the test with it.

Mechanical style is not a judgment call: hale fmt (v0.11.9, spec/testing.md) defines the canonical form, zero config, and hale fmt --check gates it in CI. Don’t hand-enforce anything in this list — run the tool:

• 4-space indentation, bracket-driven; a closer returns to its opener’s line indent; continuation lines (a leading &&/., a trailing operator) get one level.
• Binary operators spaced; unary -/! tight; ./::/.. tight; nothing inside ( ) [ ]; literal braces spaced (Rec { key: 1 }, { }); : tight-left except the spaced locus X : serves P conformance colon; generics tight (Holder<Int>); lifecycle parens tight (run()).
• Blank lines collapse to at most one; no alignment padding (let x = 1; becomes single-spaced — don’t build alignment columns, they churn every diff); exactly one trailing newline.
• Comments stay where you put them: own-line comments indent with the code, trailing comments sit one space after it.

What fmt deliberately does not decide stays yours, and is where the rest of this guide applies: where lines break (fmt preserves your line structure, gofmt-style — there is no max-line-length rewrap), naming, comment content, and blank-line placement (it collapses runs, it never inserts or removes the single separators you chose). Write the shape; let the tool make it canonical. For agents this is load-bearing: canonical form means a model-written diff touches only the lines it changed.

The catalog is small on purpose. A new primitive must roll into the seed: mirror an existing shape (a reader who knows one knows it at a glance) and interlock in composition (its outputs are valid inputs to existing consumers). A primitive that needs a paragraph of “this one works differently” is a new category, not a rolled one — log the friction, don’t ship the invention.

Each rule is tagged with its enforcement status: [error] the compiler rejects it, [warn] the compiler warns by default, [@hot] checked only inside @hot fns, [@effects] checked when the fn declares the matching effect assertion (@effects(none: {…}) or its @no_* sugar), [convention] nothing checks it — the guide is the enforcement.

Assignment of heap values into self-storage has value semantics with single ownership: every slot exclusively owns its blobs. self.g = self.f copies; a struct literal embedding a self.<field> read copies; replacing the source never corrupts the destination. You don’t defend against aliasing — the compiler/runtime maintain the invariant (and anchor retirement depends on it). [structural — the substrate handles it]

The edge that remains yours: views. .view() / .text_view() are non-owning windows over a builder’s buffer, valid only until the next overwrite/recv. Persist one with std::str::clone / std::bytes::clone; on reuse-buffer protocols adopt the deferred-clear discipline — clear the builder at the start of the next cycle, not the end of this one, so views handed out stay valid between frames (pond websocket’s client is the reference). [convention]

• One owner per fd. Wrappers over borrowed fds declare owns_fd: false (see 2.4). [convention]
• birth() acquires / dissolve() releases, with sentinel defaults so partially-built loci dissolve safely; closes are idempotent. [convention]
• Injected loci (a locus passed in via params) are caller-owned: don’t dissolve what you didn’t instantiate. [convention]

• Blocking I/O belongs on pinned (its own thread) or a where async_io pool (parks on readiness). A blocking call on a classic cooperative pool stalls every co-scheduled locus — the compiler traces this interprocedurally and warns; a blocking cooperative subscriber is a dead receiver and is an error. [warn / error]
• One non-returning run() per classic cooperative pool — a second never starts. Give daemons their own pool or pin them. [convention]
• Declare non-returning inline children last. Params birth in declaration order and an inline-on-main child’s run() runs synchronously during its own birth — so a keep-alive child declared early means every later param is never born: its birth() never runs, its subscriptions and sockets never exist, and the process looks like it booted and idles. Declare the blocker last, or move it off the main thread (pinned / a non-main pool) — only the blocker’s placement matters. The compiler warns where it can prove the shape; absence of the warning is not a guarantee. [warn]
• A single-writer state locus read from other pools: pin it, and poll scalar fields across pools rather than sharing heap values. [convention]
• TLS I/O never goes on an async_io pool (its recv blocks the worker; no park integration yet — see §7). [convention]

Declaring accept(c: Child) without release(c: Child) makes every accepted child a resident: it lives until the accepting locus dissolves. On a daemon that’s O(accepted-children) growth until OOM — the canonical accept-loop leak. Declare release(c: Child) to make children flows, reclaimed when their run() completes; or terminate them from a handler.

locus Conn {
    params { fd: Int = -1; }
    run() { while true { let f = recv(...); if f.closed { return; } ... } }
}
locus Server {
    accept(c: Conn) { }
    release(c: Conn) { }   // ← Conn is a flow: reclaim on run() return
}

The compiler warns on accept-without-release when the accepting locus’s run() loops forever; run-to-exit programs accepting a bounded batch stay silent. [warn]

• Declare topics next to their publisher; hale check verifies the pub/sub graph — a subscription nothing publishes to warns (its handler can never fire), and a cooperative subscriber whose run() blocks is a dead receiver error (the blocking call starves the dispatch that would deliver to it). [warn / error]
• Payloads are declared types, not raw Strings — the payload type is the contract. [convention]
• Delivery is synchronous at the publish site (match + enqueue); handlers run when the target’s queue drains. Don’t assume a handler ran because the publish returned. [convention]
• Single-writer collectors: fan-in by having N publishers and one subscriber append to its own private field — never share a mutable collection across loci. [convention]
• Keyed routing replaces handler-side filtering. When N instances each want their own slice of a topic’s traffic, key the topic and filter at the subscription:

  topic Posted { payload: Msg; keyed_by room; }
  locus Room {
      params { name: String = "lobby"; }
      bus { subscribe Posted as on_post where key == self.name; }
      fn on_post(m: Msg) { ... }   // only this room's traffic arrives
  }

Keys may be Int / Decimal / Time / Duration / Bool / no-payload enum / String (String keys are hash-gated — non-matching traffic costs one integer compare per entry). An if m.room == self.name in the handler is the anti-pattern this exists to delete: it makes every instance pay for every message. Keys are captured by value at registration — re-keying means dissolve + re-instantiate. on_unmatched: picks the no-match policy (swallow / fail / fallback). [convention; the routing itself is checked]

• Inline the payload at the <- send site (T <- Msg { ... } publishes from a stack slot). Routing a payload through a free fn first anchors it in the caller’s region — a per-publish leak causality hit in production. [convention]

else if chains and match (statements and expressions, with String / enum-payload / guard arms) are all first-class. A command router over a String field is a match:

fn on_command(f: Frame) {
    match std::json::find_string_field(f.json, "type") {
        "hello" -> self.on_hello(f),
        "join" -> self.on_join(f),
        "research" -> self.on_research(f),
        _ -> println("unknown command"),
    }
}

Deep } else { if ... } } ladders (a 16-deep one shipped in causality before String-match landed) are a legacy shape — rewrite on touch. F.18 exhaustiveness is checked in both positions; expression-position arms must agree on one type. [error for non-exhaustive / mismatched arms]

@effects(only: { alloc })          // closed — future-proof
@effects(none: { syscall, block, publish, time, entropy, env,
                 ffi, spawn, recursion })   // open — rots

none: lists what is forbidden and permits everything else, so a contract meaning “this handler only allocates” has to enumerate every other class — and the list is a snapshot. Add a class to the language, or declare one of your own with effect NAME;, and every such contract silently permits it. The annotation still reads “only alloc” and no longer means it. Nothing fails; the certificate quietly weakens.

only: states the permitted set and is checked against the complement computed at check time from the classes that actually exist. Nothing is written down that can go stale. [convention — reach for none: only when you genuinely care about one or two classes]

• Cell types: unqualified in-seed structs only. [error]
• Hashmap iteration is bucket-order → seq field for order; no delete → tombstone. [convention]
• A fixed-array field ([Int; N] on a struct) is out-of-line storage — it dangles across a zero-copy SHM boundary even though typecheck accepts it; SHM payloads need scalar fields. [convention — see §7]

First ask: is this path hot? Hot means a per-frame/per-message handler, a tight parse loop, an ingest path — hundreds per second and up. If not, stop here: the defaults are correct and fast (method scratch reclaims per call; the compiler elides scratch for non-allocating helpers entirely). Gold-plating a cold path buys nothing and costs shape.

For genuinely hot paths, the idioms below are the difference between flat RSS at 100k msg/s and a daemon that dies nightly. Each is production-derived. Certify the path when done — S10.

The single highest-value idiom. A locus that processes frames holds its buffers as fields and reuses them every frame:

locus WsConn {
    params {
        rx_buf: std::bytes::BytesBuilder = ...;   // frame reassembly
        tx_buf: std::bytes::BytesBuilder = ...;   // send assembly
        scratch: std::bytes::BytesBuilder = ...;  // unmask/inflate
    }
}

A locus or BytesBuilder instantiated inside a handler or loop allocates a fresh arena/buffer every message (~4.5 KB/frame measured in production) that reclaims only at method return — and its chunk only at dissolve. The compiler warns on this shape by default. pond websocket (three reused builders), the downstream service’s conn writer, and causality’s runner all converged on the fields shape independently. [warn; error under @hot]

recv_into(fd, buf, max) appends into a reused builder’s tail — zero-alloc. The allocating recv family returns a fresh buffer per call; in a loop that accumulates until the method returns. [warn in loops]

Read assembled data with .view() / .text_view() instead of snapshot() / finish() — the latter copy the builder’s whole contents per call. Views are valid until the next overwrite; C1’s deferred-clear discipline makes them safe across frames. [@hot: snapshot-in-loop is flagged]

In-place scalar mutation (self.state.px = v) is allocation-free. Whole-struct replace (self.state = State{...}) is correct — the struct bytes memcpy in place and replaced String clones retire (v0.11.3) — but each store still pays an anchor-clone + retire per String field. On a certified-hot path prefer in-place writes for the fields that changed; keep the replace when most fields genuinely change (construction-position init is legitimate now that retirement reclaims it). [@hot hint]

One shape to know: re-anchoring a field only on transition (e.g. a websocket message’s kind re-anchors only on a text/binary flip, not per frame) keeps replace costs off the per-frame path entirely — the pond client does this.

self.f = <String/Bytes> reuses the existing buffer when the new value fits. Bounded-variance fields (timestamps, fixed headers, checksums) hit the memcpy path forever. Grow-paths clone (the abandoned String buffer retires; Bytes doesn’t yet — §7), and oscillating lengths degrade capacity — genuinely variable-length hot fields belong in a reused BytesBuilder + view instead. [convention]

When one event fans out to N consumers, render the common payload once at ingest and let each consumer add only its per-consumer delta (a sequence prefix, a connection id). N× the delta beats N× the render — the downstream service renders its update JSON once and its N connections each prepend a seq. [convention]

Build human-path output with std::json::Builder (a locus — fine in cold paths), and hot-path output with raw concat into a reused buffer. Keeping both flavors side by side (render / render_pre) documents which callers are hot. [convention]

for j in 0..coll.len() (exclusive, literal-0 lower bound, no mutation of coll in the body) lets codegen elide the per-get bounds check and vectorize — measured in bench’s form-vec microbenches. And factor freely: non-allocating fns/methods cost nothing (interprocedural scratch elision since 2026-06-28) — hot code does not need to be monolithic code. [convention]

Transitively pointer-free payload types skip the serialize/ deserialize wire path entirely on cross-thread delivery — prefer scalar payloads for high-rate topics. For high-rate consumers, a Drain<T> handler runs once per queue drain with a zero-copy for over the batch instead of once per message. [convention]

When a hot path is clean, pin it:

@hot @budget(alloc_per_call = 0) fn on_frame(m: Frame) { ... }

@hot turns this guide’s warnings into hard errors inside the fn and enables the stricter hints (S3, S4). @budget(alloc_per_call = N) is the counted contract — the compiler proves the ceiling transitively through callees and fails the build on violation; N = 0 is the zero-alloc certificate. The downstream service carries @budget(alloc_per_call = 0) on its send path, its gateway ingest, and its state facade — the contracts are also the documentation. [opt-in errors]

One reader locus per source, on a where async_io pool, parked on readiness (udp::Reader, tcp recv) — no set_recv_timeout poll loops. Measured: ~4 µs p50 wake latency, stable over hours. Poll-scanner sleeps accumulate tail latency debt that looks like a runtime problem but isn’t. [convention]

A hot path that looks something up by string key in another locus (a metrics counter, a symbol table) resolves the handle once at boot and stores it as a field:

params { c_ticks: metrics::Counter; }      // resolved in main(), threaded in
fn dispatch(m: Msg) { self.c_ticks.inc(); }

Per-call keyed lookups walk a hashmap and allocate a search temp in scratch — fine cold, waste hot. (Same idiom as Go/Rust metrics code; not Hale-specific.) [convention]

• Scalar assigns (Int/Float/Bool/Decimal/Time/ Duration), LocusRef stores, view assigns, Cell fields.
• String fields holding static literals — .rodata pointers short-circuit every clone.
• The metrics RMW shape (e = store.get(k); store.set(E { key: e.key, ... })) — same-arena skips make it zero-alloc.
• Fresh literals in return position (sret routes them straight into the caller’s arena). Returning via a let binding first forfeits that routing — inline the literal on hot paths.
• hashmap.set replacing an existing key — anchored in place, replaced clones retire.

Both work. The Stream locus methods are the default idiom — they carry owns_fd semantics and fallible returns (fallible(IoError)); the __-prefixed free fns (__send_bytes / __recv_bytes / …) are the raw escape hatch for pooled/borrowed fds where locus lifecycle would fight the ownership (note their return convention: 0 = success, -1 = error — not a byte count). Historical reports of the free fns crashing natively do not reproduce on ≥ v0.10.0 and the surface is regression-tested. [convention]

// idiomatic
let n = self.users.filter(it.active).count();
self.users.filter(it.active).into(self.actives);
let total = self.users.map(it.age).sum();
let oldest = self.users.max(it.age) or raise;
self.users.filter(it.active).each { self.greet(it); }
let page = self.users.skip(20).take(10).count();
self.users.filter(it.active).sort_into(self.ranked, older_first);
self.orders.group_count_into(self.by_desk, it.desk);

// not this
let mut i = 0;
let mut n = 0;
while i < self.users.len() {
    let u = self.users.get(i) or { break; };
    if u.active { n = n + 1; }
    i = i + 1;
}

A chain is not a value being built — it is rewritten to exactly the loop on the right, so the two have identical cost. Prefer the chain because it is shorter to read, and because stages fuse: two filters are one pass, where the hand-rolled version invites an intermediate.

A chain runs over a @form(vec) source directly (self.users), and over a @form(hashmap) source anchored on .entries (self.book.entries.filter(...).count()) — the same pseudo-field a for e in m.entries loop iterates, walking the hashmap’s occupied slots. .items is the explicit vec anchor. The element it is the stored value in both.

Three properties make chains safe on a hot path, and they are worth knowing rather than assuming:

• Zero allocation. A chain is legal under @budget(alloc_per_call = 0) and @hot. Nothing is materialized until a terminal that says so (into).
• Eager. A predicate’s effects are attributed to the predicate’s own line, not the terminal’s. There is no deferred execution to mislead a witness path.
• No lambdas. it is bound by the rewrite; the predicate is syntax, not a value. Nothing captures, so nothing escapes.

Whole-set operations (sort_into, reverse_into, group_count_into) cannot fuse — they need every element before producing any — so they materialize into caller storage: the chain fills (or bumps) a collection you declared, then reorders it in place. That cost is visible in the budget, which is the point. Positional selection (take(n) / skip(n)) and the element’s ordinal (enumerate(), binding idx) DO fuse — they are counters on the one loop, not materializations.

The compiler backs this guide in tiers. Everything default is advisory or genuinely-broken-only; strictness is opt-in where you certify a path — plus one tier you get for free because your placement already declared the intent.

The tiers above certify a function. Claims certify a system, and the only real style question is which closed world owns each sentence.

Two claim verbs quantify over the whole closed world rather than over a path, which makes them the right shape for a baseline a team adopts once: require sealed(all G) (every locus in the group keeps its state to itself) and require attributed(all C) (every fn that directly performs built-in class C names a user-declared purpose). Both cover code nobody has written yet, where a group-scoped claim does not. Prefer them for policy; keep forbid reaches for the specific edges a design forbids.

• In the main locus — law about this application. A claim is evaluated in a closed world, so it belongs where the world closes. Name it for the requirement (orders_pass_risk), never for the mechanism (no_call_from_a_to_b): the name is what a reviewer reads in a diff when someone weakens it.
• In a constitution — the same sentence needed by several entrypoints. Authorship moves; evaluation does not. Each adopting main still proves it in its own world, so adopt Core; is not a shortcut around closure. Composition is union-only: a stricter rule is a second clause, never a replacement, so a derived constitution can only add law.
• In a library’s claims { } — obligations about the surface the library exports, re-evaluated in every importer.
• In a fleet plan — law no single binary can state, because it is about the arrangement. count publishers == 1 inside one program is a different sentence from “one deployed publisher”; write the second where instances exist.

Two habits worth keeping. Declare the vocabulary a claim quantifies over — an undeclared group is an error, and a group that is legitimately empty says so with may_be_empty rather than being allowed to hold vacuously. And read uncertified as work to do, not as a pass: it means the model has a hole where the claim needed to look.

Resource budgets (--dump-resource-budget, --check-resource-budget <toml>, --warn-resource-leak) gate thread / pool / subject / fd counts in CI — see spec/verification.md.

• Bare fn main() with helpers and no outer locus. Apps are loci.
• Handler-side topic filtering (if m.room == self.name) on a fan-out topic — use keyed_by + where key == (C5).
• Loci or builders instantiated per-message in a handler — hoist to fields (S1). The compiler warns.
• type for things that have flow; methods accumulating on a type — it wanted to be a locus.
• “Util” namespaces of unrelated helpers — group by vocabulary.
• Fluent builders that mutate self, decorators, TOML/JSON config in a locus, singletons in disguise — foreign patterns; find the seed shape that fits.
• Spawning a bus subscriber unowned inside a bus handler — it dissolves when the handler returns and can never fire. Compiler error; accept it instead. (In run() is fine.)
• Churning heap state directly in a run() loop — a run loop is one never-ending activation; nothing reclaims. Route per-iteration work through a method.
• Deep } else { if ladders — else if and match are first-class; String-match the command routers.
• Floating quantities — every named quantity has one locus owner. State that “lives between loci” is a modeling error.

Three different kinds of “the language doesn’t do X” live here, and they call for three different behaviors from you: absences you should stop wanting (the design says no, and names the shape to use instead), gaps you can expect to close (write the workaround knowing it’s temporary), and sharp edges you step around (current limitations, no promise either way). Current as of v0.11.3 (2026-07-17); shipped-and-gone entries are removed on shipping — keyed String routing, match-as-expression, and whole-struct replace reclamation all lived here once.

Not on any roadmap. Each has a blessed shape; reaching for the absent thing means fighting the design, not waiting on it.

• No parametric collection types (List<T> / Map<K,V>). Collections are loci: @form(vec) / @form(hashmap) / bounded[T; N] with the facade shape (2.5). A builtin generic container would be a second primitive; the locus axiom says there is one.

• No stdlib Option<T>. Two separate reasons, previously conflated here. The idiom is deliberate: the blessed “couldn’t compute” shapes are a sentinel + sibling predicate, or fallible(E) when diagnostic context matters (free fns, stdlib wrappers, and user-declared fn members all support it). An Option-threading style imports another language’s error culture; the two-channel design is the native one.

  The mechanism, however, IS missing, and this section previously claimed otherwise. A generic payload enum declares and compiles, but does not construct: type Opt<T> = enum { Some(T), None }; builds, and then Opt::Some(1) fails with “path call Opt::Some in expression position”. Non-generic payload enums construct and match normally — genericity is the whole difference, and it is the same generic-instantiation gap behind Vec<User>. So Option<T> is not merely unblessed; it is not currently expressible.

• Fn-pointer callbacks don’t capture state. Loci are the language’s closures — state lives in a locus with its own self, or routes through bus subjects. A capturing lambda would be an anonymous locus without lifecycle or contracts; name it instead.

Write the workaround knowing it’s a placeholder.

• Bytes / nested-compound fields of a replaced struct don’t retire (String leaves do, since v0.11.3). Until then: genuinely-churning Bytes fields in a reused BytesBuilder; nested compound fields in their own locus or flattened.
• striped / lockfree @form maps don’t retire replaced cells — a churned String-bearing cell on those modes still accumulates. (sync = serialized retires since 2026-08-03: reads are owned snapshots cloned into the caller’s arena, so churned shared maps no longer need to stay single-pool. The clone is per String field per read — a read-heavy hot path on a String-bearing cell now pays it, so weigh serialized against single-pool on read-dominated shapes.)
• Dynamic per-instance bus subjects (the conversation-per- topic shape). Keyed routing covers the bounded/known key-set case — including String keys — but an unbounded, runtime-created subject set still has no shape.
• TLS has no async_io integration — its recv blocks the thread, not the coro. Keep TLS off async_io pools (C3) until non-blocking TLS reads land.
• or fail E { ... } payloads can’t reference err. Wrap the fallible call in a helper that catches-and-rebuilds the error (the pond subprocess wrapper is the reference).
• Duration arithmetic in expression position is limited — hold clock readings as Int ns from the start (monotonic_ns), which is also the fast path (no ASCII round-trip).

Implementation constraints, not positions; no promise attached. One is soundness-adjacent and worth knowing cold.

• Fixed-array struct fields are out-of-line pointers, and typecheck accepts them in zero-copy SHM payloads — where they dangle cross-process. This is the sharpest edge in the list: the compiler does not stop you. SHM payloads need scalar fields (the 512-hand-spelled-fields workaround in bench marks the pain; a flattening form is future work).
• @form cell types can’t be loci or qualified paths — keep cell structs in-seed (C7).
• Lifecycle bodies reject return — factor short-circuit logic into a free helper. Related paper cut: empty if bodies parse-fail (add a comment or invert the condition). (-> () on a non-fallible method was a paper cut here until 2026-08-11; it is now a no-op unit annotation everywhere.)
• No char-level s[i] — use s[i..i+1] slices, std::str::index_of, or the UTF-8 accessors std::str::cp_at / cp_size / cp_count when you need code points rather than bytes. There is still no Char type; cp_at yields the code point as an Int.

If the catalog seems to be missing a pattern, log a friction entry with the smallest reproducible example — the catalog grows from real friction, not speculation. (That’s also how entries move between the buckets above: friction against a deliberate absence is a design conversation, not a feature request.)

The workflow that pins a leak, in escalation order:

# 1. Confirm + identify the growing arena (1 Hz heartbeat dump)
LOTUS_ARENA_RESIDENCY=1 ./binary
#    + call std::process::dump_arena_residency() from a hot path

# 2. Log every chunk attach with arena labels
LOTUS_ARENA_LOG_CHUNK_ATTACH=4096 LOTUS_ARENA_LOG_BIG_MAX_EVENTS=0 \
  LOTUS_ARENA_RESIDENCY=1 ./binary
#    grep 'kind=root label=<grower>' → the allocating call site

# 3. Pool stats at thread exit (atexit-only — long-running daemons
#    must exit early to capture; add a fixed-duration run mode)
LOTUS_CHUNK_POOL_STATS=1 ./binary

# 4. Static sweep — the model-side view of the same question
hale check app.hl                       # unbounded-alloc survey is default-on
hale check app.hl --dump-alloc-summary

Compose 1 → 2 → source grep; that exact chain pinned the May-2026 per-instance residuals. Full env-var reference: spec/runtime.md § “Diagnostic env vars”. The compiler-side ladder (§5) is the static complement — prefer fixing the shape it names over chasing the trace.

• spec/design-rationale.md — the why behind shape decisions.
• spec/semantics.md — dissolve timing, capacity slots, fallible semantics, routing keys, failure traversal.
• spec/memory.md — the substrate reclamation contract (the normative version of §1’s one-page model).
• spec/verification.md — the checks behind §5’s ladder.
• spec/forms.md — the @form(...) library.
• docs/src/systems/performance.md — the pedagogical companion to §4.
• AGENTS.md — the agent workflow; agents/compiler-dev.md for compiler sessions.
• notes/hale-types-vs-loci.md — the source axiom.