Heap-capped, slot-bounded parallel execution of untrusted PTC-Lisp work (pmap/pcalls).

Why not Task.async_stream

max_heap_size is a spawn-time BEAM option: it must be in force the instant a process is created, because the closure (and everything it captures — e.g. a large data/ snapshot bound by an enclosing let) is copied onto the new process heap before any line of the worker function runs. Task.async_stream creates the worker process itself, so a heap cap set from inside the worker body is too late by construction: the unbounded closure copy has already happened.

ParallelRunner owns the worker lifecycle so it can pass {:max_heap_size, ...} to Process.spawn at creation. The cap is then in force from process birth and the closure copy lands on a limited heap — a worker whose captured environment alone exceeds the budget is killed at the first garbage collection.

Heap model: fixed per-worker cap + global slot budget

Every parallel worker — top-level AND nested — is spawned with the same fixed worker_max_heap max_heap_size with shared-binary accounting enabled. The heap cap is NOT divided by concurrency: dividing is unsound for nested parallelism, because a parent worker stays alive while its nested children run, so a parent and its children are all live at once.

Instead, a single shared PtcRunner.Lisp.Eval.ParallelBudget semaphore (capacity max_parallel_workers) bounds how many workers may be alive at once across the whole Lisp.run/2, at every nesting depth. Each worker acquires exactly one slot before spawn and releases it on every termination path. The aggregate guarantee is:

max live parallel heap ≈ max_parallel_workers × worker_max_heap

A worker that wants to spawn nested parallelism with no slot free fails fast with :parallel_capacity_exceeded — slot acquisition is a non-blocking try-acquire, so it never deadlocks waiting on a slot that can only free when the worker itself finishes.

Other guarantees

• Heap cap at birth — every worker is spawned with {:max_heap_size, %{size: worker_max_heap, kill: true, include_shared_binaries: true, ...}}.
• One shared deadline — a single absolute deadline_mono bounds the whole operation. Nested runner calls inherit the same deadline.
• Orphan cleanup — workers are linked to the calling (sandbox) process, so if it is killed mid-operation the BEAM tears the workers down with it. On the normal failure/success path the runner explicitly kills any worker still alive.
• Deterministic error classification — abnormal exits map to stable atoms: :killed → :memory_exceeded, past-deadline → :timeout, any other abnormal exit → :runtime_error.

Link vs monitor — and the scoped trap_exit

Each worker is spawned with BOTH :link and :monitor:

• :link gives orphan cleanup for free when the caller dies. A plain :monitor does not — a monitored worker outlives its dead monitor. Since run/3 executes synchronously inside the sandbox process, the only signal that reaches a worker when the sandbox is Process.exit(pid, :kill)-ed is a link signal.
• :monitor gives the {:DOWN, ...} notification used to classify a worker's exit reason without ambiguity.

A worker killed by its heap cap exits :killed, which would propagate through the link and take the sandbox down too. To prevent that, run/3 enables trap_exit only for the duration of the call and restores the prior flag in an after block, converting worker link signals into {:EXIT, _, _} messages.

Because the sandbox process may itself be linked to a disposable caller through the link: true mode of Sandbox.execute/3, the temporary trap_exit must not swallow that caller's cancellation. run/3 therefore distinguishes {:EXIT, ...} signals by source: signals from its own workers are handled as worker exits, while an abnormal exit from any non-worker is treated as real cancellation — all workers are killed and the exit is re-propagated so linked cancellation still tears the sandbox down. :normal exits from non-workers are ignored.