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.
This cleans up vstr so that it's a pure "variable buffer", and the user
can decide whether they need to add a terminating null byte. In most
places where vstr is used, the vstr did not need to be null terminated
and so this patch saves code size, a tiny bit of RAM, and makes vstr
usage more efficient. When null termination is needed it must be
done explicitly using vstr_null_terminate.
Damien George
Paul Sokolovsky