A node was a Lua table of ~625 bytes, of which 21 keys pushed it over a
power-of-two hash boundary and eight were style copies inheritance had
splattered down from its parent. A 400 node screen cost ~250 KB and could not
coexist with wifi's buffers.
The tree now lives in src/ui/layout.h as a 16 byte struct in a flat arena, and
splits by lifetime: Node holds what hit testing and repainting need forever,
Spec holds what only measure/place read and is dropped when layout ends. Style
is sparse and resolved by walking parents, so a node naming no colours costs
nothing. Re-layout rebuilds from Lua rather than retaining the inputs.
401 nodes: 8218 B steady, 21050 B peak
Lua: ~250000 B steady
sdcard/lib/ui.lua stays the toolkit and keeps every constructor signature, but
returns integer handles: 627 lines to 374. Composition, the palette and custom
painters are still Lua on the SD card; only primitives now need a reflash.
BREAKING CHANGE: ui constructors return handles, not tables. Use
ui.setText(id, text) and keep per-node app data in a table keyed by id.
lua_app.cpp had grown to 701 lines holding every binding, the module loader and the
app lifecycle, so new bindings landed wherever the cursor was. Each Lua table now has
its own file under bindings/, and the app is recovered from the lua_State's extra
space instead of a file-static, so a second state cannot reach the wrong app.
Three tests each redeclared the binding surface, which broke twice this session when
a binding changed; test/fake_device.lua is now the single stub. `make test` runs all
four suites and pins Lua 5.4, matching the vendored interpreter rather than the 5.2
the tests had silently been using.
Corners were drawn by two disagreeing algorithms: a hand-rolled per-row inset for
the gradient fill and TFT_eSPI's Bresenham arc for the border, so they missed each
other by a pixel and left a halo. The inset was also wrong, truncating the sqrt and
ignoring pixel centres, which over-cut the top row by 2px into a visible chamfer.
gui.roundRect now derives fill and border from the same signed distance, blending
edge pixels by coverage, and replaces fillRoundRect, drawRoundRect and
fillRectGradient. The geometry moved to src/gfx/round_rect.h so round_rect_test.cpp
can check the arc on the host, since only the eye ever checked the old one.
Every app re-declared the same black/white/accent triple, so a palette now lives in
/lib/theme.lua and ui.lua derives muted, contrast, gradients and radius from it.
Deriving rather than listing means a new component costs no theme keys, and a theme
cannot pick text that is unreadable on its own accent.
Components take the palette by inheritance, so the three apps name no colors at all;
ui.theme stays for drawing outside the tree. Settings cycles the installed themes and
stores only the name.
evan