try_push returned bool, and returned *true* for a closed channel — so "the
value arrived" and "the value was thrown away because nobody is listening"
were the same answer.
Every caller was nonetheless correct, because both cases mean "stop trying,
do not park and retry". But nothing above the channel could tell the two
apart: a node counting successful pushes counted discards among them, and the
only record of the loss was the channel's own drop counter, visible solely to
whoever read the diagnostics table.
Now a three-way PushResult { Taken, Full, Closed }, matching the shape
SentinelResult already uses. Behaviour is unchanged at every call site —
each treats Closed the same as Taken, and only Full parks — but the
distinction is now available to anyone who needs it, and a scoped enum means
a future caller cannot silently reintroduce the conflation with `if (push)`.
deliver_one benefits immediately: it no longer reaches its teardown path for
a closed channel, only for one that is still full, so the last-ditch throwing
push it does there to record the loss now records an overflow rather than a
drop the channel had already counted.
RouterNode and FilterNode were the last nodes on a data path still using the
throwing push() and swallowing the result:
try { out_ch_->push(val); } catch (const ChannelOverflowError&) {}
6595e6e made node outputs lossless, 28e0667 stopped them parking a worker,
a8cfe73 did the same for FanoutNode. These two were in none of them.
For ordinary values that is the familiar silent-loss problem: a dropped item
does not degrade a downstream result, it silently changes one, and the
consumer cannot tell it happened.
For a sentinel it is a hang. EOF is what tells every downstream node to shut
down and there is nothing after it to retry, so a filter that passes EOF by
predicate but drops it by backpressure produces a pipeline that never
terminates. scene-actor-extraction's decimator is exactly that shape —
`if (f.eof) return true;` in the predicate, feeding a chain whose slowest
node is an ONNX embedder, so the output is reliably full when EOF arrives.
Everything downstream then waits forever for a token that was discarded, and
the run has to be killed.
Both now route sentinels out-of-band via push_sentinel, which consumes no
ring capacity and cannot overflow, and retry ordinary values until taken.
Like FanoutNode and unlike a pool node, these own a private thread, so
waiting costs no scheduler worker and needs no space-callback park;
stop_flag_ is rechecked every pass so teardown cannot hang on a full output.
Time spent parked is charged to blocked rather than exec, so a held-up node
does not report as busy. An out-of-range router selector still drops by
design — that item was routed nowhere, which is not the same as lost.
is_sentinel_value moves from pool_node.hpp to traits.hpp. Every node type
that forwards a value needs it; these two not having it is the bug.
Verified in both directions. On c73edff the new case delivers 6 of 40 values
and never sets saw_eof; here it delivers 40 and terminates. EOF is emitted
exactly once, as a real source does — a test source that re-offered it would
mask the bug, since a later attempt could find the channel drained.
Note for downstream: the decimator is now a backpressure point rather than a
relief valve, so the source throttles to the face branch instead of quietly
thinning it. That is the intended behaviour, but it changes the shape of a
loaded run and is worth a benchmark comparison on a known clip.
dtourolle