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.
Bytecode also needs a pass to compute the stack size. This is because
the state size of the bytecode function is encoded as a variable uint,
so we must know the value of this uint before we encode it (otherwise
the size of the generated code changes from one pass to the next).
Having an entire pass for this seems wasteful (in time). Alternative is
to allocate fixed space for the state size (would need 3-4 bytes to be
general, when 1 byte is usually sufficient) which uses a bit of extra
RAM per bytecode function, and makes the code less elegant in places
where this uint is encoded/decoded.
So, for now, opt for an extra pass.
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.
Damien George
Peter D. Gray
Paul Sokolovsky
stijn