Length was stored as a 16-bit number always. Most translations have
a max length far less. For example, US English translation lengths
always fit in just 8 bits. probably all languages fit in 9 bits.
This also has the side effect of reducing the alignment of
compressed_string_t from 2 bytes to 1.
testing performed: ran in german and english on pyruler, printed messages
looked right.
Firmware size, en_US
Before: 3044 bytes free in flash
After: 3408 bytes free in flash
Firmware size, de_DE (with #2967 merged to restore translations)
Before: 1236 bytes free in flash
After: 1600 bytes free in flash
By treating each unicode code-point as a single entity for huffman
compression, the overall compression rate can be somewhat improved
without changing the algorithm. On the decompression side, when
compressed values above 127 are encountered, they need to be
converted from a 16-bit Unicode code point into a UTF-8 byte
sequence.
Doing this returns approximately 1.5kB of flash storage with the
zh_Latn_pinyin translation. (292 -> 1768 bytes remaining in my build
of trinket_m0)
Other "more ASCII" translations benefit less, and in fact
zh_Latn_pinyin is no longer the most constrained translation!
(de_DE 1156 -> 1384 bytes free in flash, I didn't check others
before pushing for CI)
English is slightly pessimized, 2840 -> 2788 bytes, probably mostly
because the "values" array was changed from uint8_t to uint16_t,
which is strictly not required for an all-ASCII translation. This
could probably be avoided in this case, but as English is not the
most constrained translation it doesn't really matter.
Testing performed: built for feather nRF52840 express and trinket m0
in English and zh_Latn_pinyin; ran and verified the localized
messages such as
Àn xià rènhé jiàn jìnrù REPL. Shǐyòng CTRL-D chóngxīn jiāzài.
and
Press any key to enter the REPL. Use CTRL-D to reload.
were properly displayed.
This creates a common safe mode mechanic that ports can share.
As a result, the nRF52 now has safe mode support as well.
The common safe mode adds a 700ms delay at startup where a reset
during that window will cause a reset into safe mode. This window
is designated by a yellow status pixel and flashing the single led
three times.
A couple NeoPixel fixes are included for the nRF52 as well.
Fixes#1034. Fixes#990. Fixes#615.
This saves code space in builds which use link-time optimization.
The optimization drops the untranslated strings and replaces them
with a compressed_string_t struct. It can then be decompressed to
a c string.
Builds without LTO work as well but include both untranslated
strings and compressed strings.
This work could be expanded to include QSTRs and loaded strings if
a compress method is added to C. Its tracked in #531.
Jeff Epler
Scott Shawcroft