Previous to this patch, a big-int, float or imag constant was interned
(made into a qstr) and then parsed at runtime to create an object each
time it was needed. This is wasteful in RAM and not efficient. Now,
these constants are parsed straight away in the parser and turned into
objects. This allows constants with large numbers of digits (so
addresses issue #1103) and takes us a step closer to #722.
Viper can now do the following:
def store(p:ptr8, c:int):
p[0] = c
This does a store of c to the memory pointed to by p using a machine
instructions inline in the code.
This way, the native glue code is only compiled if native code is
enabled (which makes complete sense; thanks to Paul Sokolovsky for
the idea).
Should fix issue #834.