Protocols are nice, but there is no way for C code to verify whether
a type's "protocol" structure actually implements some particular
protocol. As a result, you can pass an object that implements the
"vfs" protocol to one that expects the "stream" protocol, and the
opposite of awesomeness ensues.
This patch adds an OPTIONAL (but enabled by default) protocol identifier
as the first member of any protocol structure. This identifier is
simply a unique QSTR chosen by the protocol designer and used by each
protocol implementer. When checking for protocol support, instead of
just checking whether the object's type has a non-NULL protocol field,
use `mp_proto_get` which implements the protocol check when possible.
The existing protocols are now named:
protocol_framebuf
protocol_i2c
protocol_pin
protocol_stream
protocol_spi
protocol_vfs
(most of these are unused in CP and are just inherited from MP; vfs and
stream are definitely used though)
I did not find any crashing examples, but here's one to give a flavor of what
is improved, using `micropython_coverage`. Before the change,
the vfs "ioctl" protocol is invoked, and the result is not intelligible
as json (but it could have resulted in a hard fault, potentially):
>>> import uos, ujson
>>> u = uos.VfsPosix('/tmp')
>>> ujson.load(u)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: syntax error in JSON
After the change, the vfs object is correctly detected as not supporting
the stream protocol:
>>> ujson.load(p)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OSError: stream operation not supported
With this patch objects are only checked that they have the stream protocol
at the start of their use as a stream, and afterwards the efficient
mp_get_stream() helper is used to extract the stream protocol C methods.
This patch moves the implementation of stream closure from a dedicated
method to the ioctl of the stream protocol, for each type that implements
closing. The benefits of this are:
1. Rounds out the stream ioctl function, which already includes flush,
seek and poll (among other things).
2. Makes calling mp_stream_close() on an object slightly more efficient
because it now no longer needs to lookup the close method and call it,
rather it just delegates straight to the ioctl function (if it exists).
3. Reduces code size and allows future types that implement the stream
protocol to be smaller because they don't need a dedicated close method.
Code size reduction is around 200 bytes smaller for x86 archs and around
30 bytes smaller for the bare-metal archs.
Header files that are considered internal to the py core and should not
normally be included directly are:
py/nlr.h - internal nlr configuration and declarations
py/bc0.h - contains bytecode macro definitions
py/runtime0.h - contains basic runtime enums
Instead, the top-level header files to include are one of:
py/obj.h - includes runtime0.h and defines everything to use the
mp_obj_t type
py/runtime.h - includes mpstate.h and hence nlr.h, obj.h, runtime0.h,
and defines everything to use the general runtime support functions
Additional, specific headers (eg py/objlist.h) can be included if needed.
This goes bit against websocket nature (message-based communication),
as it ignores boundaries bertween messages, but may be very practical
to do simple things with websockets.
Both read and write operations support variants where either a) a single
call is made to the undelying stream implementation and returned buffer
length may be less than requested, or b) calls are repeated until requested
amount of data is collected, shorter amount is returned only in case of
EOF or error.
These operations are available from the level of C support functions to be
used by other C modules to implementations of Python methods to be used in
user-facing objects.
The rationale of these changes is to allow to write concise and robust
code to work with *blocking* streams of types prone to short reads, like
serial interfaces and sockets. Particular object types may select "exact"
vs "once" types of methods depending on their needs. E.g., for sockets,
revc() and send() methods continue to be "once", while read() and write()
thus converted to "exactly" versions.
These changes don't affect non-blocking handling, e.g. trying "exact"
method on the non-blocking socket will return as much data as available
without blocking. No data available is continued to be signaled as None
return value to read() and write().
From the point of view of CPython compatibility, this model is a cross
between its io.RawIOBase and io.BufferedIOBase abstract classes. For
blocking streams, it works as io.BufferedIOBase model (guaranteeing
lack of short reads/writes), while for non-blocking - as io.RawIOBase,
returning None in case of lack of data (instead of raising expensive
exception, as required by io.BufferedIOBase). Such a cross-behavior
should be optimal for MicroPython needs.
This is strange asymmetry which is sometimes needed, e.g. for WebREPL: we
want to process only available input and no more; but for output, we want
to get rid of all of it, because there's no other place to buffer/store
it. This asymmetry is akin to CPython's asyncio asymmetry, where reads are
asynchronous, but writes are synchronous (asyncio doesn't expect them to
block, instead expects there to be (unlimited) buffering for any sync write
to completely immediately).
Jeff Epler
Scott Shawcroft
Damien George
Ville Skyttä
Paul Sokolovsky