D017 - Handles are per subsystem and never recycled

Status: decided Date: 2026-08-19

Each subsystem issues its own handles, and an issued handle is never reused.

Why: a handle from one subsystem passed to another is caught rather than silently plausible. Reuse makes a stale-handle bug look like a valid access to the wrong object, which is far harder to diagnose than exhaustion.

Rejected:

• One shared handle space: an audio handle passed to a file call looks valid.
• Recycling freed handles: stale use becomes wrong-object use.