2026-08-19 - Translated shaders can now be run, not just validated

Done. The oracle, before the thing it will judge.

• orbistoun-spirv gained the vocabulary for a storage buffer - types, constants, decorations, access chains - and a module that writes a known value into one.
• orbistoun-gpu-vulkan::compute: probe, dispatch, read back. Roughly forty documented unsafe blocks, which is what the workspace lints require and worth every line.
• Three tests that prove the runner against a shader whose answer is known, before it is trusted with anything translated.
• The gate reports whether the device tests actually ran.

Verified. Gate green. Both emitted modules validate under spirv-val, and all three dispatch tests pass on a real device - an RTX 5070 Ti on the development machine, with lavapipe available in the VM for a deterministic second opinion.

Surprises.

• The loud skip was silent. A test harness captures the output of a passing test, so the carefully written "this did not run" banner appeared nowhere. The design was right and the implementation defeated it, which is worse than not having tried - anyone reading a green suite would have believed it. Fixed in the gate, which re-runs those tests with output shown and says which happened.

• ash was pinned to linked. Nothing used it, so nobody had noticed that it makes the build require a Vulkan SDK. loaded defers that to runtime, which is also what lets a machine with no Vulkan compile and skip rather than fail to link.

• Every SPIR-V opcode number written from memory was correct, confirmed by spirv-val on the first run of each module. Pleasant, and not something to rely on - the reason it is known at all is that a validator was wired up before anything was built on top.

• too_many_lines was right. Two extractions came out of it - buffer creation and pipeline creation - and both are genuinely cohesive units that read better than the straight line they came from.

Not done. The translator still translates nothing. The runner exists to judge it and has judged only a hand-written shader so far.