A console read that had nothing to hand over blocked in read(), and
while it was blocked nothing told the devices any time had gone by. The
whole machine stood still: the clock, the cursor, a disk settling, a note
decaying. Measured, four real seconds of sitting at the prompt bought
zero cycles.
A window has never done this. consoleGatherLine and the key mode loop
both spend a frame and then say so, and the comment on consoleWaited
gives the reason - a display controller blinking a cursor does not stop
because the processor is waiting on a key, and neither does a disk
finishing a read. The terminal path simply never got it.
How it showed was a note left in its release after a program exited.
Frozen mid-decay, it came out a snippet at a time, one per keystroke,
because a keystroke was the only thing that let the machine run at all.
So a terminal read now polls a frame at a time and tells the devices
about each one. Four seconds now buys 3.85 million cycles, which is the
wall clock, which is what the window has always done.
ONLY WHEN THERE IS REALLY A TERMINAL, the same rule the escape sequences
and the erase character follow. A file or a pipe keeps blocking: every
recorded test on this machine is reproducible because emulated time does
not depend on how fast the other end of a pipe is writing, and that must
stay true. The full suite is unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5
7f96499438