A signal is like a pin, but ca also be inverted (active low). As such, it
abstracts properties of various physical devices, like LEDs, buttons,
relays, buzzers, etc. To instantiate a Signal:
pin = machine.Pin(...)
signal = machine.Signal(pin, inverted=True)
signal has the same .value() and __call__() methods as a pin.
This provides mp_vfs_XXX functions (eg mount, open, listdir) which are
agnostic to the underlying filesystem type, and just require an object with
the relevant filesystem-like methods (eg .mount, .open, .listidr) which can
then be mounted.
These mp_vfs_XXX functions would typically be used by a port to implement
the "uos" module, and mp_vfs_open would be the builtin open function.
This feature is controlled by MICROPY_VFS, disabled by default.
In this, don't allocate copy, just return non-empty string. This helps
with a standard pattern of buffering data in case of short reads:
buf = b""
while ...:
s = f.read(...)
buf += s
...
For a typical case when single read returns all data needed, there won't
be extra allocation. This optimization helps uasyncio.
They are one-line functions and having them inline in mp_init/mp_deinit
eliminates the overhead of a function call, and matches how other state
is initialised in mp_init.
This is how CPython does it, and it's very useful to help users discover
the available modules for a given port, especially built-in and frozen
modules. The function does not list modules that are in the filesystem
because this would require a fair bit of work to do correctly, and is very
port specific (depending on the filesystem).
If result guaranteedly fits in a small int, it is handled in objint.c.
Otherwise, it is delegated to mp_obj_int_from_bytes_impl(), which should
be implemented by individual objint_*.c, similar to
mp_obj_int_to_bytes_impl().
Damien George
Paul Sokolovsky