Phase 5 of the post-PR-#31 audit, and the structural piece that
closes the failure mode the earlier phases couldn't fix alone.
The audit's recurring diagnosis: pixel/audio goldens capture
*whatever* the program does, not what it *should* do. A silent
drop in codegen is still deterministic — the golden locks in
the broken behaviour and every future run agrees with it. That's
how state-locals, uninitialized struct-field writes, `on exit`
handlers, and `slow` placement each sat broken for months-to-a-
year in a green CI.
The canary inverts the relationship: the committed golden is a
solid-green universal backdrop that only appears when every
round-trip check passes. Each check writes a distinctive constant
through one language construct, reads it back, and clears
`all_ok` on mismatch. A final `if all_ok == 0 { set_palette Fail }`
flips the entire screen red for the rest of the run.
Checks cover the silent-drop shapes caught by this audit:
- state-local variable write-read (PR #31)
- uninitialized struct-field write-read (caught by phase 1)
- u8 / u16 globals (u16 exercises both StoreVar + StoreVarHi)
- array-element write at nonzero index
- `slow`-placed global still round-trips
- function call return value
The canary doesn't use `debug.assert` on purpose — debug-only
ops get stripped in release and the emulator harness runs
release builds. The palette swap works in release and is what
the harness pixel-diff sees.
### Why this matters as a long-lived test
The harness already had 34 pixel goldens covering full-program
behaviour, but none of them exist specifically to fail if a
*specific language feature* silently drops. The canary does.
Every silent-drop bug the audit found would have flipped it
red the moment the check was added, which is the "behaviour
assertion that can't be satisfied by silence" the plan called
for.
### Harness footprint
`tests/emulator/goldens/feature_canary.{png,audio.hash}` +
`examples/feature_canary.{ne,nes}`. 35/35 ROMs match their
goldens with the canary added. Listed in both README tables.
https://claude.ai/code/session_01AoQ678uVeqpyayvWHpfDhC
