I checked the entire codebase, and every place that vstr_init_len
was called, there was a call to mp_obj_new_str_from_vstr after it.
mp_obj_new_str_from_vstr always tries to reallocate a new buffer
1 byte larger than the original to store the terminating null
character.
In many cases, if we allocated the initial buffer to be 1 byte
longer, we can prevent this extra allocation, and just reuse
the originally allocated buffer.
Asking to read 256 bytes and only getting 100 will still cause
the extra allocation, but if you ask to read 256 and get 256
then the extra allocation will be optimized away.
Yes - the reallocation is optimized in the heap to try and reuse
the buffer if it can, but it takes quite a few cycles to figure
this out.
Note by Damien: vstr_init_len should now be considered as a
string-init convenience function and used only when creating
null-terminated objects.
Previous to this patch, if "abcd" and "ab" were possible completions
to tab-completing "a", then tab would expand to "abcd" straight away
if this identifier appeared first in the dict.
The TimeoutError is useful for some modules, specially the the
socket module. TimeoutError can then be alised to socket.timeout
and then Python code can differentiate between socket.error and
socket.timeout.
When "micropython -m pkg.mod" command was used, relative imports in pkg.mod
didn't work, because pkg.mod.__name__ was set to __main__, and the fact that
it's a package submodule was missed. This is an original workaround to this
issue. TODO: investigate and compare how CPython deals with this issue.
When enabled this allows the internal storage to be split over 2
contiguous regions of flash (two segments), and so the storage can be
increased.
This option is disabled by default, giving original behaviour.
Previous to this patch each time a bytes object was referenced a new
instance (with the same data) was created. With this patch a single
bytes object is created in the compiler and is loaded directly at execute
time as a true constant (similar to loading bignum and float objects).
This saves on allocating RAM and means that bytes objects can now be
used when the memory manager is locked (eg in interrupts).
The MP_BC_LOAD_CONST_BYTES bytecode was removed as part of this.
Generated bytecode is slightly larger due to storing a pointer to the
bytes object instead of the qstr identifier.
Code size is reduced by about 60 bytes on Thumb2 architectures.
