To filter out even prototypes of mp_stream_posix_*() functions, which
require POSIX types like ssize_t & off_t, which may be not available in
some ports.
Helpful when porting existing C libraries to MicroPython. abort()ing in
embedded environment isn't a good idea, so when compiling such library,
-Dabort=abort_ option can be given to redirect standard abort() to this
"safe" version.
Something like:
if foo == "bar":
will be always false if foo is b"bar". In CPython, warning is issued if
interpreter is started as "python3 -b". In MicroPython,
MICROPY_PY_STR_BYTES_CMP_WARN setting controls it.
Currently, MicroPython runs GC when it could not allocate a block of memory,
which happens when heap is exhausted. However, that policy can't work well
with "inifinity" heaps, e.g. backed by a virtual memory - there will be a
lot of swap thrashing long before VM will be exhausted. Instead, in such
cases "allocation threshold" policy is used: a GC is run after some number of
allocations have been made. Details vary, for example, number or total amount
of allocations can be used, threshold may be self-adjusting based on GC
outcome, etc.
This change implements a simple variant of such policy for MicroPython. Amount
of allocated memory so far is used for threshold, to make it useful to typical
finite-size, and small, heaps as used with MicroPython ports. And such GC policy
is indeed useful for such types of heaps too, as it allows to better control
fragmentation. For example, if a threshold is set to half size of heap, then
for an application which usually makes big number of small allocations, that
will (try to) keep half of heap memory in a nice defragmented state for an
occasional large allocation.
For an application which doesn't exhibit such behavior, there won't be any
visible effects, except for GC running more frequently, which however may
affect performance. To address this, the GC threshold is configurable, and
by default is off so far. It's configured with gc.threshold(amount_in_bytes)
call (can be queries without an argument).
3-arg form:
stream.write(data, offset, length)
2-arg form:
stream.write(data, length)
These allow efficient buffer writing without incurring extra memory
allocation for slicing or creating memoryview() object, what is
important for low-memory ports.
All arguments must be positional. It might be not so bad idea to standardize
on 3-arg form, but 2-arg case would need check and raising an exception
anyway then, so instead it was just made to work.
This follows source code/header file organization similar to few other
objects, and intended to be used only is special cases, where efficiency/
simplicity matters.
Paul Sokolovsky
Dave Hylands
Damien George
Daniel Tralamazza