mp_obj_t internal representation doesn't have to be a pointer to object,
it can be anything.
There's also a support for back-conversion in the form of MP_OBJ_UNCAST.
This is kind of optimization/status quo preserver to minimize patching the
existing code and avoid doing potentially expensive MP_OBJ_CAST over and
over. But then one may imagine implementations where MP_OBJ_UNCAST is very
expensive. But such implementations are unlikely interesting in practice.
This is rarely used feature which takes enough code to implement, so is
controlled by MICROPY_PY_ARRAY_SLICE_ASSIGN config setting, default off.
But otherwise it may be useful, as allows to update arbitrary-sized data
buffers in-place.
Slice is yet to implement, and actually, slice assignment implemented in
such a way that RHS of assignment should be array of the exact same item
typecode as LHS. CPython has it more relaxed, where RHS can be any sequence
of compatible types (e.g. it's possible to assign list of int's to a
bytearray slice).
Overall, when all "slice write" features are implemented, it may cost ~1KB
of code.
This makes exception traceback info self contained (ie doesn't rely on
list object, which was a bit of a hack), reduces code size, and reduces
RAM footprint of exception by eliminating the list object.
Addresses part of issue #1126.
Traceback allocation for exception will now never lead to recursive
MemoryError exception - if there's no memory for traceback, it simply
won't be created.
Multiplication of a tuple, list, str or bytes now yields an empty
sequence (instead of crashing). Addresses issue #799
Also added ability to mult bytes on LHS by integer.
Updated functions now do proper checking that n_kw==0, and are simpler
because they don't have to explicitly raise an exception. Down side is
that the error messages no longer include the function name, but that's
acceptable.
Saves order 300 text bytes on x64 and ARM.
Paul Sokolovsky
Damien George