D084 - Instrument the GPU before translating any of it

assumed · 2026-08-19

Two new pieces, neither of which translates anything: orbistoun-gpu::packet walks a submitted command buffer into packets, and orbistoun-shader walks shader bytecode into instructions. Both stop at "what is in here", and refuse to guess at meaning.

The reasoning is the one the import survey already proved. "Emulate the operating system" was unbounded until it became a frequency-ranked list of functions; then it became a queue. The GPU is in exactly that pre-survey state, and it is the larger of the two problems.

Translation is not a search problem - no amount of iterating on failures writes a compiler, because a half-written translator emits nothing rather than something slightly wrong. But deciding what to build next is a counting problem, and counting can start immediately, needs no GPU, no driver and no running emulator, and produces the one number that ranks the work: which single instruction, supported, unblocks the most shaders.

So the census exists first, and the translator is written against its output.