ABORT is documented and tested in this codebase as standard FORTH-79 behavior -- system_words_test.c:63: "Should clear stacks and return to QUIT" -- meaning it should unwind all the way back to the outermost interpreter loop, abandoning whatever's left of the current line/block. The implementation only unwound one level: every place that checked vm->abort_requested cleared it the instant it saw it, so it never survived to propagate past the first nested frame. This surfaced via Artemis's ART-HALT-UNRECOG (capsules/artemis/init.4th): on an unrecognized disk it correctly printed "ARTEMIS HALT: unrecognized disk content" and called ABORT, but WELCOME (the next line in the same block) ran anyway, and Artemis announced ready to Hermes and joined the fleet normally -- contradicting .claude/ARTEMIS.md's "Refuse to mount... do not overwrite it" requirement. Root cause is general, not Artemis-specific, and present identically in both the hosted and kernel VM cores. Fixed at every level execution can nest through, verified by exhaustively grepping every !vm->error-gated continuation loop and adding the parallel !vm->abort_requested check: - execute_colon_word (src/vm.c, src/starkernel/vm/vm_core.c): stop clearing the flag on return -- every colon-word call is a recursive call to this same function, so leaving it set lets every enclosing frame's own check also unwind. - vm_interpret (src/vm.c, src/starkernel/vm/vm_core.c): stop parsing further words in the current input string once the flag is set. - exec_block_with_retry (src/starkernel/capsule/capsule_loader.c): capsule birth's line-by-line block executor -- stop processing further lines in the current block, but return 0 (not -1), so capsule_exec_payload still loads later blocks in the same capsule payload. Returning -1 here would have silently broken word definitions in blocks that come after the aborting one for reasons unrelated to why it aborted (concretely, Artemis's ART-PING/LOAD-DOE in blocks 4851/4852, which follow the entry block 4133). - THRU and --> (src/word_source/block_words.c): stop processing further blocks/lines in their own loops. - DODOES (src/word_source/defining_words.c): the CREATE...DOES> runtime has its own hand-rolled execution loop, separate from execute_colon_word -- same bug class, same fix. Also guarded the post-loop "if (vm->rsp < base_rsp) vm->rsp = base_rsp" clamp so it doesn't fire on an abort exit -- ABORT's own reset_vm_state() already set rsp; restoring it to base_rsp would have partially undone that. - Both REPL loops (src/repl.c, src/starkernel/repl.c x2 call sites): clear the flag after each line, mirroring the existing vm->error pattern, so a mid-line abort doesn't silently freeze subsequent interactive input. Verified directly: ": AB-TEST 1 2 3 ABORT 999 . ; AB-TEST 42 . CR 777 . CR" -- 999 never prints (stops mid-colon-word), 42 never prints (stops the rest of the same line), 777 prints fine (next line unaffected). Artemis: WELCOME/"Artemis ready" no longer fires after the halt message. No regression: all three architectures still show PASS: persist-read, PASS: E2E msg flow, and matching dict_hash on the normal (non-aborted) boot path; hosted test suite 965 passed / 0 failed. Known follow-up, not fixed here (see memory for details): Artemis still announces ready to Hermes via a separate call path (CD-INIT, block 4141) that never went through capsule_exec_payload's block chain in the first place, and the disk file still picks up incidental writes even on a correctly-halted boot -- likely generic block-subsystem housekeeping, not traced yet. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
src/
Hosted StarForth VM implementation (compiled by the root Makefile).
Bare-metal kernel sources live in src/starkernel/; FORTH word
implementations in src/word_source/; the test harness in
src/test_runner/; platform shims in src/platform/.
Entry point / interpreter core
main.c— CLI entry point, VM init, DoE mode dispatch.vm.c— interpreter loop, stacks, dictionary state (the central runtime file).vm_api.c— external VM API implementation.vm_bootstrap.c— VM bootstrap initialization.vm_debug.c— debugging utilities.vm_time.c— time-related VM operations.vm_internal.h— internal-only declarations shared across thevm_*.cfiles, not part of the publicinclude/vm_api.hsurface.repl.c— REPL read-eval-print loop.cli.c— CLI argument parsing.io.c— I/O operations.log.c— logging infrastructure.
Memory / dictionary / blocks
memory_management.c— dictionary allocator.dictionary_management.c— dictionary allocation and search.dictionary_heat_optimization.c— Loop #1 execution-heat tracking.word_registry.c— word registration system.block_subsystem.c— logical→physical block mapper.blkio_file.c,blkio_ram.c,blkio_factory.c— block I/O backends (file-backed, RAM-backed) and the factory that selects between them.stack_management.c— stack operations.
Physics-driven adaptive runtime (7 feedback loops)
physics_runtime.c— main physics coordinator.physics_hotwords_cache.c— Loop #1 hot-words caching.physics_metadata.c— per-word metadata tracking.physics_pipelining_metrics.c— Loop #4 word-transition prediction.physics_execution_hooks.c— execution instrumentation.rolling_window_of_truth.c— Loop #2 circular execution-history buffer.inference_engine.c— Loops #5/#6, statistical inference (window-width, decay-slope).ssm_jacquard.c— L8 Jacquard steady-state mode selector; consumescompudynamics.cfor tuning-word/config lookups.compudynamics.c— generic compudynamics module (cd_tuning_word(),cd_tuning_vm()); the score/UCB/reward/weight constants for the L8 adaptive table live here, not inssm_jacquard.c.heartbeat_export.c— heartbeat metrics export (CSV export function itself not yet implemented — seedocs/working/architecture/heartbeat_csv_export.md).
Math / measurement
math_portable.c— portable math functions.profiler.c— performance profiling.doe_metrics.c— Design of Experiments metrics (2^7 factorial).
Any .bak file alongside a .c file here (doe_metrics.c.bak,
inference_engine.c.bak, vm.c.bak) is a pre-edit backup left by a past
maintenance script (see scripts/remove_loop_conditionals.sh), not a
build input.