D345 - Input crosses the process boundary before anything can read it

decided · 2026-08-27 · an inconsistency pointed out, and it was right

The event queue was built with no deliverable events: raise, withhold, count, wait for a measurement. Then the input transport was refused on the grounds that nothing on the far side could consume it - which is the same shape and the opposite answer. Both are a mechanism that is ours beside a payload encoding that is a measurement, and mixing the two is what produces confident wrong answers. Either both are premature or neither is.

Neither. Request::Input carries pad state to the worker, orbistoun_input::latest holds it, and scePadReadStateExt still refuses to write a structure nobody has measured.

What it buys before that measurement arrives, which is the part worth recording because "it will be useful later" is not a reason:

• Focus stops being a tested function with no observable effect. What a title may see is decided in the window, and nothing downstream can widen it: the shell's own button is always stripped, and a title without focus is handed a pad nobody is holding rather than the last state it saw, held forever.
• The transport has a property that can be asserted now - what the window sent arrives intact - and it is asserted through the real protocol loop rather than by round-tripping the type, because the interesting failure is a message routed to the wrong place.
• The gap is counted. "N pad update(s) arrived and none reached the guest - no measured layout to write one into" is a transport waiting for something; silence would be one that looks broken.

Three details settled along the way. Input is a level, not a stream, so the latest state replaces the previous one and an unchanged pad sends nothing - a queue would replay presses that finished seconds ago, which is worse than losing them. An absent port answers neutral rather than an error, because a title enumerating four pads with two configured should find two nobody is holding, which is what a real machine with two controllers looks like. And Request lost its Eq derive, which Event never had: a stick position is a real number and there is no total ordering on those.