micropython puts the pointer-ness into the typedef; we can put the
const-ness there too.
this reduces the delta to micropython; for instance, emitinlinextensa
and emitinlinethumb now match upstream.
to trade compile speed & flash size
Initially enable the faster mode on rp2040 and espressif, where there's
usually plenty of flash available (these advanced techniques save hundreds
to thousands of bytes, which is important on a lot of old samd21 boards
but is a drop in the lake of a 4MB flash chip)
any qstr of >= 3 chars long is a candidate for use; the input byte value
(1) is used to indicate a fixed-length qstr number follows.
Before accounting for the code size changes, this saves ~100 bytes
on trinket m0, but it may end up being a wash due to added code.
A cutoff of length>2 is slightly better for ja and ru and worse for others.
This has to do with the relative frequency of latin characters vs non-latin
characters, is my guess.
lang after before change (- = more free space)
en_US 3132 2996 -134
fr 2136 2060 -76
ja 1916 1724 -232
ru 2196 2000 -196
This breaks the translation dependency to all of the other objects
and therefore speeds up subsequent builds. Now, even when the big
translate() function is inlined in the header, it only needs to be
optimized once.
