Incremental compilation

nimsem serve — persistent warm-worker daemon

Type feature · Status Prototype (Phase 1) · Consumed by nimony-lsp (opt-in) · ← ledger

The change

A persistent semcheck worker that keeps the interner (pool), the loaded-interface cache (prog.mods) and the derived style indexes warm across many requests, so shared interfaces (notably std/system) are parsed and interned once per session instead of once per module. This is the foundation for interactive / incremental (LSP) rebuilds.

Protocol (docs/daemon-protocol.md, envelope v0): line-framed JSONL on stdin/stdout. Verbs:

• semcheck — byte-identical to nimsem m
• setOverlay / clearOverlay / inline overlays — dirty-buffer submit: an editor client can override an on-disk file with an in-memory buffer via the openNifStream seam
• shutdown
• reserved (schema fixed, handler stubbed): recheck, defs, symbols

Invalidation (prepareForNextRequest) puts correctness before speed: state that could be stale is dropped before each request. Does not touch the idetools text format.

Files touched: nimony/nimsem.nim, docs/daemon-protocol.md.

Why it’s opt-in for the cold build

The cold full-build payoff is marginal — system re-intern is CPU-cheap and hidden behind the parallel fan-out — so serve is oriented toward persistent-session use. nimony-lsp wires it as an opt-in navigation backend that falls back to idetools on any miss.