Previous to this patch each time a bytes object was referenced a new
instance (with the same data) was created. With this patch a single
bytes object is created in the compiler and is loaded directly at execute
time as a true constant (similar to loading bignum and float objects).
This saves on allocating RAM and means that bytes objects can now be
used when the memory manager is locked (eg in interrupts).
The MP_BC_LOAD_CONST_BYTES bytecode was removed as part of this.
Generated bytecode is slightly larger due to storing a pointer to the
bytes object instead of the qstr identifier.
Code size is reduced by about 60 bytes on Thumb2 architectures.
Previous to this patch a call such as list.append(1, 2) would lead to a
seg fault. This is because list.append is a builtin method and the first
argument to such methods is always assumed to have the correct type.
Now, when a builtin method is extracted like this it is wrapped in a
checker object which checks the the type of the first argument before
calling the builtin function.
This feature is contrelled by MICROPY_BUILTIN_METHOD_CHECK_SELF_ARG and
is enabled by default.
See issue #1216.
Hashing is now done using mp_unary_op function with MP_UNARY_OP_HASH as
the operator argument. Hashing for int, str and bytes still go via
fast-path in mp_unary_op since they are the most common objects which
need to be hashed.
This lead to quite a bit of code cleanup, and should be more efficient
if anything. It saves 176 bytes code space on Thumb2, and 360 bytes on
x86.
The only loss is that the error message "unhashable type" is now the
more generic "unsupported type for __hash__".
Exceptions in .close() should be ignored (dumped to sys.stderr, not
propagated), but in uPy, they are propagated. Fix would require
nlr-wrapping .close() call, which is expensive. Bu on the other hand,
.close() is not called often, so maybe that's not too bad (depends,
if it's finally called and that causes stack overflow, there's nothing
good in that). And yet on another hand, .close() can be implemented to
catch exceptions on its side, and that should be the right choice.
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.
"Base" should rather refer to "base type"."Base object for attribute
lookup" should rather be just "object".
Also, a case of common subexpression elimination.
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.
To enable parsing constants more efficiently, mp_parse should be allowed
to raise an exception, and mp_compile can already raise a MemoryError.
So these functions need to be protected by an nlr push/pop block.
This patch adds that feature in all places. This allows to simplify how
mp_parse and mp_compile are called: they now raise an exception if they
have an error and so explicit checking is not needed anymore.
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.
This patch consolidates all global variables in py/ core into one place,
in a global structure. Root pointers are all located together to make
GC tracing easier and more efficient.
Paul Sokolovsky
Damien George