The nan-boxing representation has an extra 16-bits of space to store
small-int values, and making use of it allows to create and manipulate full
32-bit positive integers (ie up to 0xffffffff) without using the heap.
The function mp_obj_new_str_of_type is a general str object constructor
used in many places in the code to create either a str or bytes object.
When creating a str it should first check if the string data already exists
as an interned qstr, and if so then return the qstr object. This patch
makes the function have such behaviour, which helps to reduce heap usage by
reusing existing interned data where possible.
The old behaviour of mp_obj_new_str_of_type (which didn't check for
existing interned data) is made available through the function
mp_obj_new_str_copy, but should only be used in very special cases.
One consequence of this patch is that the following expression is now True:
'abc' is ' abc '.split()[0]
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.
The parser was originally written to work without raising any exceptions
and instead return an error value to the caller. But it's now required
that a call to the parser be wrapped in an nlr handler, so we may as well
make use of that fact and simplify the parser so that it doesn't need to
keep track of any memory errors that it had. The parser anyway explicitly
raises an exception at the end if there was an error.
This patch simplifies the parser by letting the underlying memory
allocation functions raise an exception if they fail to allocate any
memory. And if there is an error parsing the "<id> = const(<val>)" pattern
then that also raises an exception right away instead of trying to recover
gracefully and then raise.
Previous to this patch any non-interned str/bytes objects would create a
special parse node that held a copy of the str/bytes data. Then in the
compiler this data would be turned into a str/bytes object. This actually
lead to 2 copies of the data, one in the parse node and one in the object.
The parse node's copy of the data would be freed at the end of the compile
stage but nevertheless it meant that the peak memory usage of the
parse/compile stage was higher than it needed to be (by an amount equal to
the number of bytes in all the non-interned str/bytes objects).
This patch changes the behaviour so that str/bytes objects are created
directly in the parser and the object stored in a const-object parse node
(which already exists for bignum, float and complex const objects). This
reduces peak RAM usage of the parse/compile stage, simplifies the parser
and compiler, and reduces code size by about 170 bytes on Thumb2 archs,
and by about 300 bytes on Xtensa archs.
This patch allows uPy consts to be bignums, eg:
X = const(1 << 100)
The infrastructure for consts to be a bignum (rather than restricted to
small integers) has been in place for a while, ever since constant folding
was upgraded to allow bignums. It just required a small change (in this
patch) to enable it.
Grammar rules have 2 variants: ones that are attached to a specific
compile function which is called to compile that grammar node, and ones
that don't have a compile function and are instead just inspected to see
what form they take.
In the compiler there is a table of all grammar rules, with each entry
having a pointer to the associated compile function. Those rules with no
compile function have a null pointer. There are 120 such rules, so that's
120 words of essentially wasted code space.
By grouping together the compile vs no-compile rules we can put all the
no-compile rules at the end of the list of rules, and then we don't need
to store the null pointers. We just have a truncated table and it's
guaranteed that when indexing this table we only index the first half,
the half with populated pointers.
This patch implements such a grouping by having a specific macro for the
compile vs no-compile grammar rules (DEF_RULE vs DEF_RULE_NC). It saves
around 460 bytes of code on 32-bit archs.
It is split into 2 functions, one to make small ints and the other to make
a non-small-int leaf node. This reduces code size by 32 bytes on
bare-arm, 64 bytes on unix (x64-64) and 144 bytes on stmhal.
In both parse.c and qstr.c, an internal chunking allocator tidies up
by calling m_renew to shrink an allocated chunk to the size used, and
assumes that the chunk will not move. However, when MICROPY_ENABLE_GC
is false, m_renew calls the system realloc, which does not guarantee
this behaviour. Environments where realloc may return a different
pointer include:
(1) mbed-os with MBED_HEAP_STATS_ENABLED (which adds a wrapper around
malloc & friends; this is where I was hit by the bug);
(2) valgrind on linux (how I diagnosed it).
The fix is to call m_renew_maybe with allow_move=false.
This fixes constant substitution so that only standalone identifiers are
replaced with their constant value (if they have one). I.e. don't
replace NAME in expressions like obj.NAME or NAME = expr.
Assignments of the form "_id = const(value)" are treated as private
(following a similar CPython convention) and code is no longer emitted
for the assignment to a global variable.
See issue #2111.
Most grammar rules can optimise to the identity if they only have a single
argument, saving a lot of RAM building the parse tree. Previous to this
patch, whether a given grammar rule could be optimised was defined (mostly
implicitly) by a complicated set of logic rules. With this patch the
definition is always specified explicitly by using "and_ident" in the rule
definition in the grammar. This simplifies the logic of the parser,
making it a bit smaller and faster. RAM usage in unaffected.
The chunks of memory that the parser allocates contain parse nodes and
are pointed to from many places, so these chunks cannot be relocated
by the memory manager. This patch makes it so that when a chunk is
shrunk to fit, it is not relocated.
Constant folding in the parser can now operate on big ints, whatever
their representation. This is now possible because the parser can create
parse nodes holding arbitrary objects. For the case of small ints the
folding is still efficient in RAM because the folded small int is stored
inplace in the parse node.
Adds 48 bytes to code size on Thumb2 architecture. Helps reduce heap
usage because more constants can be computed at compile time, leading to
a smaller parse tree, and most importantly means that the constants don't
have to be computed at runtime (perhaps more than once). Parser will now
be a little slower when folding due to calls to runtime to do the
arithmetic.
Before this patch, (x+y)*z would be parsed to a tree that contained a
redundant identity parse node corresponding to the parenthesis. With
this patch such nodes are optimised away, which reduces memory
requirements for expressions with parenthesis, and simplifies the
compiler because it doesn't need to handle this identity case.
A parenthesis parse node is still needed for tuples.
MICROPY_ENABLE_COMPILER can be used to enable/disable the entire compiler,
which is useful when only loading of pre-compiled bytecode is supported.
It is enabled by default.
MICROPY_PY_BUILTINS_EVAL_EXEC controls support of eval and exec builtin
functions. By default they are only included if MICROPY_ENABLE_COMPILER
is enabled.
Disabling both options saves about 40k of code size on 32-bit x86.
To use, put the following in mpconfigport.h:
#define MICROPY_OBJ_REPR (MICROPY_OBJ_REPR_D)
#define MICROPY_FLOAT_IMPL (MICROPY_FLOAT_IMPL_DOUBLE)
typedef int64_t mp_int_t;
typedef uint64_t mp_uint_t;
#define UINT_FMT "%llu"
#define INT_FMT "%lld"
Currently does not work with native emitter enabled.
This allows the mp_obj_t type to be configured to something other than a
pointer-sized primitive type.
This patch also includes additional changes to allow the code to compile
when sizeof(mp_uint_t) != sizeof(void*), such as using size_t instead of
mp_uint_t, and various casts.
It makes much more sense to do constant folding in the parser while the
parse tree is being built. This eliminates the need to create parse
nodes that will just be folded away. The code is slightly simpler and a
bit smaller as well.
Constant folding now has a configuration option,
MICROPY_COMP_CONST_FOLDING, which is enabled by default.
With this patch parse nodes are allocated sequentially in chunks. This
reduces fragmentation of the heap and prevents waste at the end of
individually allocated parse nodes.
Saves roughly 20% of RAM during parse stage.
unix-cpy was originally written to get semantic equivalent with CPython
without writing functional tests. When writing the initial
implementation of uPy it was a long way between lexer and functional
tests, so the half-way test was to make sure that the bytecode was
correct. The idea was that if the uPy bytecode matched CPython 1-1 then
uPy would be proper Python if the bytecodes acted correctly. And having
matching bytecode meant that it was less likely to miss some deep
subtlety in the Python semantics that would require an architectural
change later on.
But that is all history and it no longer makes sense to retain the
ability to output CPython bytecode, because:
1. It outputs CPython 3.3 compatible bytecode. CPython's bytecode
changes from version to version, and seems to have changed quite a bit
in 3.5. There's no point in changing the bytecode output to match
CPython anymore.
2. uPy and CPy do different optimisations to the bytecode which makes it
harder to match.
3. The bytecode tests are not run. They were never part of Travis and
are not run locally anymore.
4. The EMIT_CPYTHON option needs a lot of extra source code which adds
heaps of noise, especially in compile.c.
5. Now that there is an extensive test suite (which tests functionality)
there is no need to match the bytecode. Some very subtle behaviour is
tested with the test suite and passing these tests is a much better
way to stay Python-language compliant, rather than trying to match
CPy bytecode.
Previous to this patch all interned strings lived in their own malloc'd
chunk. On average this wastes N/2 bytes per interned string, where N is
the number-of-bytes for a quanta of the memory allocator (16 bytes on 32
bit archs).
With this patch interned strings are concatenated into the same malloc'd
chunk when possible. Such chunks are enlarged inplace when possible,
and shrunk to fit when a new chunk is needed.
RAM savings with this patch are highly varied, but should always show an
improvement (unless only 3 or 4 strings are interned). New version
typically uses about 70% of previous memory for the qstr data, and can
lead to savings of around 10% of total memory footprint of a running
script.
Costs about 120 bytes code size on Thumb2 archs (depends on how many
calls to gc_realloc are made).
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.
To enable parsing constants more efficiently, mp_parse should be allowed
to raise an exception, and mp_compile can already raise a MemoryError.
So these functions need to be protected by an nlr push/pop block.
This patch adds that feature in all places. This allows to simplify how
mp_parse and mp_compile are called: they now raise an exception if they
have an error and so explicit checking is not needed anymore.
Previously to this patch all constant string/bytes objects were
interned by the compiler, and this lead to crashes when the qstr was too
long (noticeable now that qstr length storage defaults to 1 byte).
With this patch, long string/bytes objects are never interned, and are
referenced directly as constant objects within generated code using
load_const_obj.
