RESIDENCY

The third axis of the container model: identity says what an object is, a representation says how it is encoded, residency says where the useful bytes — and execution state — live at this moment.

Residency is operational, never semantic: the same container means the same thing mmap-cold on NVMe or resident in unified memory. The pinned division: the format may carry portable residency facts — access class, zero-copy capability, evictability, co-use grouping, state lifetimes — while placement belongs to a runtime plan that is never persisted. A device name in the format would age with the machine, not the model. And residency is measured, not assumed: sparse does not imply a small resident set.

IN THE GRAPH