Previous to this patch the printing mechanism was a bit of a tangled
mess. This patch attempts to consolidate printing into one interface.
All (non-debug) printing now uses the mp_print* family of functions,
mainly mp_printf. All these functions take an mp_print_t structure as
their first argument, and this structure defines the printing backend
through the "print_strn" function of said structure.
Printing from the uPy core can reach the platform-defined print code via
two paths: either through mp_sys_stdout_obj (defined pert port) in
conjunction with mp_stream_write; or through the mp_plat_print structure
which uses the MP_PLAT_PRINT_STRN macro to define how string are printed
on the platform. The former is only used when MICROPY_PY_IO is defined.
With this new scheme printing is generally more efficient (less layers
to go through, less arguments to pass), and, given an mp_print_t*
structure, one can call mp_print_str for efficiency instead of
mp_printf("%s", ...). Code size is also reduced by around 200 bytes on
Thumb2 archs.
This simplifies the API for objects and reduces code size (by around 400
bytes on Thumb2, and around 2k on x86). Performance impact was measured
with Pystone score, but change was barely noticeable.
Despite initial guess, this code factoring does not hamper performance.
In fact it seems to improve speed by a little: running pystone(1.2) on
pyboard (which gives a very stable result) this patch takes pystones
from 1729.51 up to 1742.16. Also, pystones on x64 increase by around
the same proportion (but it's much noisier).
Taking a look at the generated machine code, stack usage with this patch
is unchanged, and call is tail-optimised with all arguments in
registers. Code size decreases by about 50 bytes on Thumb2 archs.
Eg, "() + 1" now tells you that __add__ is not supported for tuple and
int types (before it just said the generic "binary operator"). We reuse
the table of names for slot lookup because it would be a waste of code
space to store the pretty name for each operator.
Previous patch c38dc3ccc7 allowed any
object to be compared with any other, using pointer comparison for a
fallback. As such, existing code which checked for this case is no
longer needed.
This is a simple optimisation inspired by JITing technology: we cache in
the bytecode (using 1 byte) the offset of the last successful lookup in
a map. This allows us next time round to check in that location in the
hash table (mp_map_t) for the desired entry, and if it's there use that
entry straight away. Otherwise fallback to a normal map lookup.
Works for LOAD_NAME, LOAD_GLOBAL, LOAD_ATTR and STORE_ATTR opcodes.
On a few tests it gives >90% cache hit and greatly improves speed of
code.
Disabled by default. Enabled for unix and stmhal ports.
Going from MICROPY_ERROR_REPORTING_NORMAL to
MICROPY_ERROR_REPORTING_TERSE now saves 2020 bytes ROM for ARM Thumb2,
and 2200 bytes ROM for 32-bit x86.
This is about a 2.5% code size reduction for bare-arm.
Uninitialised struct members get a default value of 0/false, so this is
not strictly needed. But it actually decreases code size because when
all members are initialised the compiler doesn't need to insert a call
to memset to clear everything. In other words, setting 1 extra member
to 0 uses less code than calling memset.
ROM savings in bytes: 32-bit unix: 100; bare-arm: 44; stmhal: 52.
Because (for Thumb) a function pointer has the LSB set, pointers to
dynamic functions in RAM (eg native, viper or asm functions) were not
being traced by the GC. This patch is a comprehensive fix for this.
Addresses issue #820.