GitNexus/gitnexus/bench/receiver-resolution/BASELINE.md

Receiver-resolution baseline

baseline.json is the source of truth for every number. It is what measure.mjs --check enforces byte-exactly. This file is a lab notebook: each section records what was measured AT THAT UNIT and why it changed the plan. A figure here that disagrees with baseline.json is a superseded snapshot, not a live claim — sections carry a snapshot marker where that has already happened. Never quote a count from this file into code, a gate, or a commit message; read it from baseline.json.

Receiver ORIGIN — three quarters of the hedge was the program boundary

The drop count was measuring two different things and reporting both as uncertainty. Dumping all 102 call drops with source context settles it:

Origin	Count	Is anything lost?
external	44	No. System.out.println, fetch(...), os.environ.setdefault, document.body.appendChild, .stream(). The callee is not in the graph — there is no node an edge could point at.
in-program	36	Yes in principle — but see below.
unknown	22	Yes. Casts, ternaries, globalThis.x ??= [], and everything the classifier will not guess about.

These numbers moved once, in review, and the movement is the point. They were first measured as 76 / 20 / 6, when external was the FALLTHROUGH: any base whose type did not resolve was called external. Review reproduced two triggers where that published epistemic: 'exact' over a real in-program loss — a Go pointer receiver (*Host, whose lookup was missing the decoration stripper) and any base with no type binding at all, including this branch's own droppedCall(svc) fixture. external is now a POSITIVE determination via LanguageProvider.isBuiltInName, and everything unproven is unknown, which still hedges. So external fell 76 -> 44 and the difference went to in-program (+16, the drops that really were ours) and unknown (+16, the drops we decline to characterize). Total call drops is unchanged at 102 — this is re-bucketing, not resolution.

A controlled A/B over the Java built-in set (off vs on, same tree) reads 7/36/59 vs 44/36/22: in-program is byte-identical across the toggle, so naming built-ins reclassified nothing the index can demonstrate is ours.

A compiler resolves System.out.println against the JDK. Lacking the JDK, the honest statement is "this call leaves the analyzed program" — not "this analysis is incomplete". Those are different epistemic states, and collapsing them is what made impact report a lower bound on essentially every real codebase, which is what teaches readers to ignore the signal.

ResolutionOutcome.receiverOrigin now records which one applies, and summarizeUnresolvedReceivers skips external. unknown still counts — assuming a completeness we cannot demonstrate is the unsafe direction.

How origin is decided

By the receiver base's declared type, not its name. A first cut asked whether the base was a local, which marked inputs.stream() in-program: inputs is a local, but its type List<String> is JDK, so the target is external. Asking whether the base's type is one this index contains moved 28 sites to the correct bucket.

What the remaining in-program drops actually are

Mostly not product defects. user.Address.Save() resolves cleanly in isolation — the csharp-deep-field-chain fixture alone emits both expected edges with zero drops. It drops in the count arm only because the corpus is ~200 independent mini-projects in one directory and 55 files define Address, so the resolver correctly declines on ambiguity rather than picking one. That is right behaviour measured on an unrepresentative corpus.

The genuinely untypeable population is the unknown bucket — and those are the real targets for type resolution, because a cast gives you the type (((Box<String>) obj).open()) and a ternary needs a join of its branch types. They were previously invisible under the stdlib calls the old fallthrough swept into external.

callDropsByOrigin is now part of the gated projection, so this split cannot drift silently.

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Phantom callee read sites — a duplicate-edge bug the U8 test missed

Go's @reference.read pattern matches every selector_expression, with no call-position exclusion. So h.dep.Work() minted three reference sites:

site	kind	name	what it is
S1	call	Work	the member call
S2	read	Work	phantom — the callee h.dep.Work, already captured by S1
S3	read	dep	the genuine field read

S2 resolved through findOwnedMember, which prefers methods over fields, and emitted an ACCESSES edge to the method duplicating S1's CALLS edge at the same position.

The U8 assertion passed by accident. It asserted RunSamePackage → Work was absent from ACCESSES, and it was — but only because that row has a pointer receiver whose text-cascade head lookup failed for an unrelated reason. The value-receiver twin was emitting the bad edge the whole time:

ACCESSES  RunFromValueReceiver -> DoWork:Method     <- phantom, shipped
ACCESSES  RunLocal             -> DoWork:Method     <- phantom, shipped

First fix, at capture: drop the match outright, on the rule "a selector in function position is never a read." That rule is false, and review caught it. In Go a func-typed struct field IS read and then called indirectly — h.dep.Work() where Work func() error — and isCalleeOfMemberCall cannot tell a method from a func-valued field, because the AST shape is identical. Dropping at capture therefore deleted the only ACCESSES evidence for callback structs, hook structs and hand-rolled mocks (mock.DoFunc, opts.OnEvent).

Second fix, and the one that shipped: split the decision across the two layers that each hold half of it. Capture records the POSITION as a fact (@reference.callee-position → ReferenceSite.inCalleePosition) — only the AST knows it, and it is gone by resolution time. Emit makes the DECISION from the resolved target's kind — only resolution knows whether the tail is a method or a field, and it may be declared in another package. Neither layer can answer alone. The suppression is language-neutral in graph-bridge/edges.ts and keys on the canonical CALL_TARGET_TYPES, so Macro and Delegate targets are covered too.

A method value (f := h.dep.Work) is not in function position and is untouched. The assertion is backed by an exact-set check over the whole fixture — now carrying target KINDS, so it catches both a new phantom and a deleted genuine read.

What the numbers say

• callDrops unchanged at 102 — no call was lost, in either fix.
• read drops went 27 → 22 under the capture-time drop, then 22 → 27 again once the marker replaced it. The round trip is the finding: those five sites are genuine field reads, and the first fix was scoring their deletion as an improvement.
• totalDropsAllKinds 124 → 129, the same five sites.
• One drop reclassified chain-field → chain-unwrap. The phantom and the real call share a site key, so the phantom's field-shaped chain was previously the one recorded. The census now describes the actual dropped call.

Caught by three review agents dispatched at the A1 regression; the phantom was the mechanism, not the global-normalization story the first revert note asserted. The func-field regression it introduced was then caught by two more, on the tri-review of #2782 — which is the argument for the exact-set-with-kinds assertion over the targeted one that passed by accident the first time.

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U9 (part 2) — no drop ratchet is needed; the gate is already stronger

The plan's R10 set a ZERO supported-shape drop target, and review correctly found that it contradicts R12: a site whose normalized name matches more than one class MUST decline, a decline records a drop, and simple names collide routinely in large Go and Java codebases. The proposed fix was a ratchet — the count may not rise above the value measured after the last unit.

Neither is needed. measure.mjs --check already asserts exact match against the committed baseline, which is strictly stronger than a ratchet: the count cannot rise or fall without a deliberate --update-baseline, and that path prints an instruction to explain the movement in the commit message. A ratchet would be a weakening.

So R10 as written (zero) was wrong, and the ratchet proposed to repair it is redundant. The existing gate stands, now also covering callDropsByShape since the shape census joined the gated projection.

Deferred and NOT done: the impact risk-cutoff recalibration. Review flagged that added edges push symbols toward the absolute cutoffs (directCount >= 30, impacted.length >= 200), so edits read HIGHER risk without being more dangerous, and agents warning on HIGH/CRITICAL escalate more often. That is real, but measuring it honestly needs a before/after risk distribution over a corpus large enough for those thresholds to bind — the committed fixtures are nowhere near 200 impacted symbols. Recording it as owed rather than inventing a number from fixtures that cannot exercise the cutoffs.

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U6 — the depth cap does NOT limit resolution. Measured, not raised.

The premise was that a chain deeper than MAX_CHAIN_DEPTH (3) is discarded whole rather than truncated, so a 4-hop builder chain "contributes nothing at all". The first half is true; the second is not.

fourHopChain was added to the TypeScript corpus as a declared extra specifically to make the question answerable — without a chain longer than the cap, raising the cap measures nothing:

root.getSvc().getUser().address.getCity().save();
//   ^step1     ^step2   ^step3   ^step4   receiver of `save` = 4 steps

Cap	Chain minted?	Cell state
3	none (confirmed by probing the emitter directly)	RESOLVES
4	2|root|cgetSvc|cgetUser|faddress|cgetCity	RESOLVES

The site resolves at BOTH depths. At 3 it resolves through the text cascade, which owns the fallback path and runs to its own COMPOUND_RECEIVER_MAX_DEPTH of 8.

So the cap bounds which chains are typed structurally, not which calls resolve. Raising it moves work from the cascade to the fold without changing a single edge — measured across the whole matrix: totals identical at 3 and 4, callDrops 102 at both.

Left at 3. The fixture is committed so the next person to reach for this number inherits the measurement instead of the intuition.

What DID need fixing: unwrapTransparentReceiver shared MAX_CHAIN_DEPTH as its iteration bound. The two answer unrelated questions — how many chain hops do we type, versus how many redundant parens might someone write — so raising the chain cap would have silently widened the paren peel as a side effect. That coupling got worse when the await/subscript work added a peel call at loop entry. Now MAX_TRANSPARENT_WRAPPER_DEPTH, its own constant.

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U9 — the epistemic hedge has TWO producers, and only one is a defect

impact reports epistemic: 'lower-bound' for two independent reasons that were previously indistinguishable in the output:

Cause	Unit	What it means	Is it a defect?
receiverTyping	call sites	Call sites dropped because the analyzer could not type the receiver	Yes — a resolver gap. This is the population this whole series targets.
dispatchBoundary	symbols	The symbol sits behind an interface with real consumers or 2+ implementations; the number is the implementations plus interface-level consumers behind it	No — callers binding through DI or dynamic dispatch are genuinely untraceable statically. A compiler refuses here too.
externalBoundary	call sites	The call left the indexed program (System.out.println, fetch(...))	No, and not even a shortfall — there is no in-graph node an edge could have reached. An epistemic: 'exact' result can carry it.

Both collapsed into one enum plus prose, so a consumer — especially a coding agent gating its own edits on the result — could tell THAT a count was short but not WHY, and could not branch on the difference. Worse, it made "the hedge should stop appearing" unfalsifiable: with no way to see which producer fired, there was no way to check whether fixing receiver typing had done anything.

impact and context now carry a structured causes: { receiverTyping, dispatchBoundary, externalBoundary } alongside the prose. Every field counts MISSING THINGS, never notes: there is one note per symbol name (and one per boundary node) but each reports N of something, so counting notes published 1 next to prose reading "2 call sites", and a consumer branching on the number would have read a different magnitude than the human reading the text. The same rule applies to dispatchBoundary, which counts the implementations plus interface-level consumers behind the boundary rather than the boundary sentences — one sentence can describe an interface with 40 implementations. Its unit is SYMBOLS rather than call sites because per-site multiplicity is not retained on those edges (consumers are counted DISTINCT, and collapseMemberCallsByCallerTarget languages emit one CALLS edge per caller/target pair); the units are stated per field on EpistemicCauses so a consumer knows which it is holding.

Only the receiverTyping producer is addressed by this series. The dispatch boundary is untouched and will keep firing for interface-dispatched symbols — which is correct. Any claim that the hedge has "stopped appearing" has to be read per-producer, and that is now possible.

Measured on the #2766 reproduction: WithTx went from impactedCount: 0 with a lower-bound hedge to impactedCount: 1 with epistemic: exact. The hedge is gone there because its cause is gone, not because it was suppressed.

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U10 — recorded drops, censused by receiver shape

ResolutionOutcome's suppressed variant now carries receiverShape, set by the emitting case from the site's ENCODED CHAIN — the compact string the capture emitters mint by walking the real AST. Never re-derived from the source line: doing that would mean regex-classifying the number that gates this work, the same textual-shape dispatch the structural-receiver line exists to remove. Diagnostic only, so the persisted RepoMeta.unresolvedReceiverMembers artifact is unchanged.

Census of the call drops on the committed fixture corpus, as measured at U10 — it predates the phantom-read fix documented above, which reclassified one drop chain-field → chain-unwrap. callDropsByShape in baseline.json is current:

Shape	Count	Share
chain-field — every step a field (h.repo.save())	60	59%
chain-call — every step a call (svc.getUser().save())	27	27%
no-chain — no chain minted; the walk found no nameable base	12	12%
chain-mixed — interleaved (svc.getUser().addr.save())	2	2%

Two decisions come out of it.

The .java bucket is not one defect. Its 49 call drops split 30 field-chain / 14 call-chain / 5 no-chain, so the open question of whether Java's largest- single-bucket status hides a single cause is answered: it does not. It is the same population as everywhere else, just more of it.

Field-receiver chains are where the remaining value is. At 59% of the U10 census they dominate, and they are precisely the shape U1 fixed for Go. The same defect class in java, csharp, cpp, php, py and rust is the largest addressable population the count arm can see. (This paragraph used to quote a per-extension × per-shape split from the U10 run. baseline.json carries callDropsByExtension and callDropsByShape but not their cross-product, so that split has to be re-derived from a fresh run rather than read off the committed baseline.)

What this census CANNOT justify. Await-wrapped and subscript receivers barely appear, because the committed fixture corpus contains almost no such sites — not because they are rare in real code. At U10 indexElement was a gap in every language in the shape arm, so U5's population was real but structurally invisible to the count arm. (It no longer is uniform — the subscript route resolves in several languages now; read the current per-language state from indexElement in baseline.json, not from this paragraph.) The durable point: any decision to fund or drop U4 and U5 has to be read off the SHAPE arm, because reading it off this census confuses "absent from these fixtures" with "does not happen".

U2 — shape matrix expanded to a canonical axis

The shape arm was three languages with an ad-hoc shape list each. It is now a canonical 10-shape axis (SHAPE_IDS) that every language must answer for, with two states added so a hole cannot masquerade as a measurement:

• N/A — the grammar does not admit this spelling. A reason is required. An omitted cell and a genuinely inapplicable cell look identical in a diff otherwise, which is how coverage rots.
• GRAMMAR-UNAVAILABLE — the parser could not be loaded, so nothing was measured. Neither passes nor fails the gate, and drift skips it on both sides so the gate cannot fail for the environment it ran in. tree-sitter-dart, -kotlin and -swift are vendored optional grammars: absent when a run sets GITNEXUS_SKIP_OPTIONAL_GRAMMARS=1, and soft-failing when no vendored prebuild matches the host (the set covers darwin/linux arm64+x64 and win32-arm64 — a win32-x64 or musl host has none). All 14 load on a glibc linux-x64 host, so this state has no producer in the committed baseline — it guards the skip-flag and unsupported-host cases rather than a condition seen here.

assertMatrixComplete throws when a language omits a cell, declares an unknown id, or writes an N/A with no reason. Languages may declare extraShapeIds for diagnostics the canonical axis cannot express (PHP's annotated/unannotated return-type pair, C++'s pointer/value base pair) — an extra must be declared, so it stays a deliberate diagnostic rather than a typo'd canonical id.

Vue and COBOL are language-level N/A rows: their emitters never call synthesizeReceiverChainCapture, so there is nothing to measure — but the language axis now obeys the same no-omitted-cells rule as the shape axis.

What the first expanded run found

Three results that redirected the plan they were built to serve. Snapshot: the first U2 run, before any of the fixes below landed — these cells state the problem, and several have since flipped (baseline.json is current):

Go — the root cause, isolated to one cell. Three rows vary receiver decoration and field decoration independently:

Cell	Receiver	Field	State
fieldReceiverCall	value	value	RESOLVES
decoratedFieldType	value	pointer	RESOLVES
decoratedReceiverBase	pointer	value	VISIBLE-GAP

Only the pointer receiver fails. Go already normalizes field type bindings through normalizeGoTypeName, so the step lookup is sound and the defect is entirely the base — synthesizeGoReceiverBinding stores typeNode.text raw, so func (h *Host) binds h to the literal *Host, which findClassBindingInScope cannot resolve.

PHP — the sigil hypothesis is dead. The two rows differ only in whether the called method declares a return type:

Cell	Return type	State
arrowCallChain — $svc->getUser()->save()	unannotated	INVISIBLE-GAP
plainChain — $svc->getUserTyped()->save()	annotated	RESOLVES

Same chain, same ->, same base. PHP chains resolve when the return type is declared; the $ sigil is not involved. decoratedFieldType (?User $repo) also resolves, so PHP nullable field types already work.

C++ — the base already resolves, but this-> field receivers do not. pointerArrowChain and valueDotChain both RESOLVE, so a decorated C++ base is not a gap. this->repo.save() and this->repo->save() were both INVISIBLE-GAP when this was written — a distinct defect, not a decoration one — and #2833 closed it: a language that declares this IS the enclosing class (resolveThisViaEnclosingClass) synthesizes no this typeBinding anywhere, so a chain whose BASE is this could never seed its head. It was never a generics gap; the NON-generic control failed identically. C++'s fieldReceiverCall and decoratedFieldType cells moved INVISIBLE-GAP -> RESOLVES with it.

Rust — the decorated receiver is NOT a gap. &mut self resolves, so Go is the only language whose method receiver decoration defeats the lookup. Rust's gap is the field: Box<User> is INVISIBLE-GAP.

The decoration cells, across all 14

The rows U1 exists to fix. Everything else is a different defect. Snapshot: as measured at U2, i.e. BEFORE U1 landed — it is the statement of the problem, not of the current state. Go's decoratedReceiverBase and TypeScript's decoratedFieldType have since moved; baseline.json has the live cells.

Language	decoratedReceiverBase	decoratedFieldType
go	VISIBLE-GAP (*Host)	RESOLVES
rust	RESOLVES (&mut self)	INVISIBLE-GAP (Box<User>)
typescript	N/A	INVISIBLE-GAP (User | null)
csharp	N/A	VISIBLE-GAP (User?)
swift	N/A	INVISIBLE-GAP (User?)
cpp	N/A	INVISIBLE-GAP (User*)
python, php, kotlin, dart	N/A	RESOLVES
java, c, javascript, ruby	N/A	N/A

So U1's measured scope is Go's receiver base, plus the field-type gap in Rust, TypeScript, C#, Swift and C++ — and not PHP, Python, Kotlin, Dart or Java, whose decoration handling already works or does not exist. Five of the seven hooks the plan speculatively listed were aimed at languages that need none; three languages that do need one were not on the list at all.

Other gaps this run surfaced, not in the plan

• Swift resolves almost nothing. plainChain, plainDeepChain, optionalChain and nonNullAssert are all INVISIBLE-GAP, while fieldReceiverCall resolves. Chained receivers are essentially unsupported.
• Ruby chains are VISIBLE-GAPs (plainChain, plainDeepChain, optionalChain) and fieldReceiverCall on @repo is INVISIBLE.
• C++ this-> field receivers are INVISIBLE-GAP in both the value and pointer form.
• C# has four gaps beyond the field one: optionalChain, nonNullAssert, awaitParen, explicitTypeArgs.
• Dart await already resolves — the only language where awaitParen is green, which makes it the reference for U4's unwrap direction.
• indexElement was INVISIBLE-GAP in all 14 at U2 — uniform, and exactly what U5 targets. (Superseded: several languages resolve it now; see baseline.json.)

Coverage status

All 14 languages measured, plus vue and cobol as language-level N/A rows. The cell tally recorded at U2 was 164 cells / 42 RESOLVES / 22 VISIBLE-GAP / 31 INVISIBLE-GAP / 69 N/A / 0 GRAMMAR-UNAVAILABLE — a snapshot, superseded by every unit since (the axis also gained TypeScript's declared fourHopChain extra). Count the states off baseline.json rather than quoting this line.

The count arm did not move when the shape axis was expanded — shape fixtures are built in temp directories and never touch the committed corpus, so expanding the shape axis moves the shape arm only.

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Updated after U10 (structural receiver typing wired into Case 0). Three TypeScript shapes flipped to RESOLVES — svc?.getUser().save(), svc!.getUser().save(), svc.getTyped<User>().save() — and the call-drop count did not move: 99 before, 99 after.

That is the whole argument for the shape arm, now demonstrated rather than predicted. The committed fixture corpus contains none of those three spellings, so a gate reading only the drop count would have scored a working change as "no improvement" and stopped the series. Nothing regressed: no edge was lost and no new drop appeared.

Two gaps remained open at U10, both genuine at the time:

• (await svc.getUserAsync()).save() — extractMixedChain reached await …, which is not a chain node, so no chain was minted. It was a VISIBLE-GAP and is the call-kind fixture in the drop-recorder test.
• repos[0].save() — Case 0's punctuation gate never fired for a subscript receiver, so it was INVISIBLE.

Both were subsequently closed for TypeScript by the await/index step kinds (wire format v2) and by Case 0's third gate arm, which admits any site carrying a minted chain regardless of receiver punctuation. Per-language state is in baseline.json — awaitParen and indexElement.

The tables below are the pre-U10 measurement, kept as the reference point.

U7 — the go/no-go gate: PASS

A/B produced by reverting ONLY the fold wiring (compound-receiver.ts + receiver-bound-calls.ts) to the pre-U10 commit and rebuilding, so capture emission — and therefore the persisted bytes — is identical in both arms and the delta isolates the fold. Build + both caches wiped before every run (KTD4).

Metric	Control	Treatment	Δ	Threshold	Verdict
scope-resolution wall-clock, median of 3	25470.0 ms	25687.9 ms	+0.86%	≤ +3%	PASS
wall-clock, slowest of 3	25520.0 ms	25832.6 ms	+1.22%	≤ +5% p95	PASS
serialized bytes per emitting site	—	35.2 B	—	≤ 48 B	PASS
persisted store growth	1 234 600 B	1 235 340 B	+0.0599%	≤ 3%	PASS
retained chain payload	—	740 B	—	≤ 6 MB	PASS
call drops (no regression)	99	99	0	no new drops	PASS
peak RSS	—	—	—	≤ +2%	NOT RESOLVABLE

The 35.2 B result confirms KTD7 by measurement rather than by assertion. The 48-byte threshold was set deliberately so the object encoding (~71 B predicted) fails and the compact string (~35 B predicted) passes. Measured: 35.2 B, including the JSON key and quotes. The encoding decision is now evidence-backed.

Peak RSS: the threshold is below this instrument's resolution, so it is reported as unresolvable rather than as a pass or a fail. Three independent treatment runs with the code held constant gave 414.9 / 436.6 / 436.9 MB — a 5.3% spread, wider than the ±2% being tested. (An earlier pair of 3-reps-in-one- process runs read 536 vs 551 MB and looked like a +2.77% regression; that was heap accumulating across reps, not growth.) Corroborating argument that no growth exists to find: the change persists 740 bytes across the entire corpus and the fold allocates nothing retained — it returns SymbolDefinitions the indexes already hold.

Fold hit-rate. Chains are minted for 21 of 529 TypeScript reference sites (4.0%) — the field costs nothing on the 96% of sites with a bare-name receiver. On the shape corpus, all 5 chain-carrying shapes resolve, so the fold is not pure added cost on this population.

Not measured: a dedicated synthetic miss-dominant scaling corpus. The plan asks for scaling_ratio < 1.5 on one, on the grounds that a same-name corpus hits at ownerChain[0] and never exercises the MRO tail. Stated plainly so it is not mistaken for a silent pass. What bounds the cost instead: the fold runs with fieldFallback: false, so the O(fields × depth × names) path the threshold exists to police cannot execute at all, and the remaining work is at most MAX_CHAIN_DEPTH (3) map lookups per MRO ancestor per chained site, over a population of 21 sites. The wall-clock A/B above is the empirical check on that reasoning.

Measured with bench/receiver-resolution/measure.mjs on f87b2cbe.

Hygiene (a run without both steps is void — analyze --force clears neither cache, and the parse worker runs from dist/):

npm run build
rm -rf .gitnexus/parse-cache .gitnexus/parsedfile-cache
node --import tsx bench/receiver-resolution/measure.mjs --corpus test/fixtures/lang-resolution

Two consecutive runs were byte-identical, not merely within noise.

Count arm — test/fixtures/lang-resolution

Snapshot: the U7-era measurement (commit f87b2cbe), kept as the reference point for the A/B above. The gate enforces countArm in baseline.json, which has moved since — read the live call-drop number, site-kind split, and per-extension breakdown from there.

Metric	Value at U7
Call drops (the gate number)	99
Total drops, all site kinds	124
Split by site kind	call: 99, read: 25

Call drops by extension, at U7:

ext	n	ext	n	ext	n
.java	49	.py	5	.rs	3
.cs	8	.go	5	.kt	3
.ts	7	.cpp	5	.rb	2
.tsx	6	.php	4	.js	1
				.swift	1

Why the split matters (KTD6 defect 1, now measured). About a fifth of the drops are property reads, not lost calls (25 of 124 at U7; bySiteKind in baseline.json is current). Case 0's recorder gates on the receiver's punctuation, not on what the reference is, so d.source.kind lands in the same bucket as a dropped method call. Gating on the unsplit total would have measured a population one fifth of which this work does not target.

Shape arm

RESOLVES means an edge exists — not that it points at the right target. A name-keyed fallback onto a same-named member reads as RESOLVES, so a shape whose receiver has no well-defined type is not a usable control.

Snapshot: the pre-U10 measurement over three languages, kept because it is the evidence that the shape arm moves when the count arm does not. Superseded twice — by U8's rollout table above and by the canonical shape axis in baseline.json. The three TypeScript rows marked as gaps here (?., !, <T>) all resolve now.

Language	Shape	State at pre-U10	siteKind
TypeScript	svc.getUser().save()	RESOLVES	—
TypeScript	svc.getUser().address.save()	RESOLVES	—
TypeScript	svc?.getUser().save()	INVISIBLE-GAP	—
TypeScript	svc!.getUser().save()	VISIBLE-GAP	call
TypeScript	(await svc.getUserAsync()).save()	VISIBLE-GAP	call
TypeScript	svc.getTyped<User>().save()	INVISIBLE-GAP	—
TypeScript	repos[0].save()	INVISIBLE-GAP	—
PHP	$svc->getUser()->save()	VISIBLE-GAP	call
PHP	$this->repo->save() (typed property)	RESOLVES	—
C++	svc->getUser()->save()	INVISIBLE-GAP	—
C++	svc2.getUser()->save()	RESOLVES	—

Corrections to the plan, forced by measurement

1. Three target shapes are invisible, not one. The plan records only repos[0].save() as unrecorded. Measured, svc?.getUser().save() and svc.getTyped<User>().save() are equally invisible: no edge and no drop.

   This is the load-bearing correction. A gate built on the call-drop count alone would move by zero when those three shapes are fixed, reading a working change as "no improvement" — the same false-negative hazard the plan flags for stale shards, arriving by a different route. Hence the shape arm: it is blind to nothing, because it asks about edge presence rather than about a recorder that has to have fired.

2. Invisibility is NOT a capture-layer gap. Measured directly against emitTsScopeCaptures, all five TypeScript shapes emit a full call match — @reference.call.member, @reference.name, and crucially @reference.receiver:

   Shape	@reference.receiver
   svc?.getUser().save()	svc?.getUser()
   svc.getTyped<User>().save()	svc.getTyped<User>()
   repos[0].save()	repos[0]

   So a ReferenceSite exists for every one of them, and hanging a receiverChain field on ReferenceSite is a viable carrier for all of them. That was worth establishing before building on it.

   The drop suppression is therefore downstream of capture. For repos[0] the cause is known and matches the plan: the receiver has neither . nor (, so Case 0's gate never fires. For ?. and <T> the receiver text satisfies the gate, so Case 0 does run and one of two things happens — the site was marked in handledSites by another case, or resolveCompoundReceiverClass returned a class on which the member was then not found, leaving compoundReceiverUnresolved false. Those are materially different defects and which one applies is not yet determined; it is the first thing U10 has to establish, since the second would mean the recorder under-reports by mis-attribution rather than by a gate.

   (An earlier revision of this file asserted that these shapes produce no reference site at all. That was inferred from edge-and-drop absence and is disproven by the capture dump above.)

3. KTD6 defect 2 overstates the PHP blindness. The claim is that Case 0's C-family punctuation test means PHP -> receivers "never record a drop at all". Measured, $svc->getUser()->save() is recorded, because its receiver text $svc->getUser() contains ( and satisfies the gate. And the plan's own example, $this->repo->save(), does not need recording — with a typed property it resolves. The genuine PHP gap is the call chain, and it is already visible.

4. The C++ defect is the -> base receiver specifically. svc->getUser()->save() is invisible while svc2.getUser()->save() resolves. Same chain, same ->save() tail — only the base differs. This is exactly why cpp-chain-call/ has never caught it: that fixture uses the value . form, which works.

Known blind spots

Every count here is a lower bound on a known-biased population, and any later delta must be read against the same bias. Kept in sync with KNOWN_BLIND in measure.mjs, which prints these on every run.

• Case 0 is reached by a receiver-TEXT punctuation test (. or () or by a minted receiver chain. A receiver spelled without that punctuation — a subscript repos[0], a PHP -> / :: property path — therefore reaches the recorder only where its emitter mints a chain. Where no chain is minted, the call still vanishes with the instrument blind to it.
• A drop is recorded only while compoundReceiverUnresolved stays true. When the cascade TYPES the receiver but then finds no member on it, the flag is false and no drop is recorded even though no edge was emitted. So an absent drop is not evidence a site resolved — the recorder can under-report by mis-attribution, not only by a gate. (This is what moved PHP's arrowCallChain from VISIBLE-GAP to INVISIBLE-GAP when its fixture parameter was typed; see U8 below.)
• Retracted, and left here because it was quoted for several units: the earlier claim that ?. and explicit type arguments "produce no reference site at all". They do — the capture dump under "Corrections to the plan" §2 shows a full call match with @reference.receiver for all three of svc?.getUser(), svc.getTyped<User>() and repos[0]. The absence was of an EDGE and of a DROP, never of a site.

U8 — per-language rollout

Emission moved into one shared helper (utils/receiver-chain-captures.ts) and is wired into all 14 language emitters. The helper is language-free (R6): its call gate reads the @reference.call.* tag prefix, a vocabulary every language's .scm query shares, rather than a per-language tag list. It is self-gating — a non-call match, an absent receiver, or a chain with no nameable base all leave the match untouched — so inserting the call before every out.push(grouped) is safe even in the emitters that have three or four such paths.

Language	Shape	Before	After
TypeScript	svc?.getUser().save()	INVISIBLE-GAP	RESOLVES
TypeScript	svc!.getUser().save()	VISIBLE-GAP	RESOLVES
TypeScript	svc.getTyped<User>().save()	INVISIBLE-GAP	RESOLVES
C++	svc->getUser()->save()	INVISIBLE-GAP	RESOLVES
C++	svc2.getUser()->save() (control)	RESOLVES	RESOLVES
PHP	$svc->getUser()->save()	VISIBLE-GAP	INVISIBLE-GAP
PHP	$this->repo->save() (control)	RESOLVES	RESOLVES

The C++ row is the one the plan flagged as having no fixture anywhere — cpp-chain-call/ uses the value . form, which already worked. It now has one, plus the value-dot control that proves the defect was the -> base specifically.

PHP: a measured residual, with the trap checked

PHP does not resolve yet, and the plan's named trap — a language whose node type is missing from extractMixedChain's tables reads as "didn't need it" when it in fact cannot be measured — is not the cause. Checked directly against the emitter:

name=save   chain=1|$svc|cgetUser   recv=$svc.getUser()

The leading 1 is the v1 wire prefix current when this dump was taken; the codec is at v2 now (2|$svc|cgetUser), and a v2 decoder refuses a v1 payload by design — do not copy this literal into a fixture.

The chain is minted correctly. The residual is that the fold's base, $svc, does not bind in the PHP resolver, so the fold returns undefined and the site falls through to the text cascade. That is PHP binding-key work, not a chain-layer defect, and it is left as a recorded residual rather than absorbed into this series.

Two incidental corrections from that check, both to KTD6:

• PHP's receiver capture text is normalized to $svc.getUser() — DOTS, not ->. So Case 0's "C-family punctuation" gate fires for PHP after all, which is why the call chain was recorded as a VISIBLE-GAP to begin with.
• Typing the fixture parameter (function f(Service $svc)) moved the row from VISIBLE-GAP to INVISIBLE-GAP: with a type binding the cascade now types the receiver but finds no member, so compoundReceiverUnresolved is false and no drop is recorded. An untyped fixture parameter had been reporting a language gap that was really a fixture defect — the same error class as the untyped $repo control caught earlier.