This patch makes configurable, via MICROPY_QSTR_BYTES_IN_HASH, the
number of bytes used for a qstr hash. It was originally fixed at 2
bytes, and now defaults to 2 bytes. Setting it to 1 byte will save
ROM and RAM at a small expense of hash collisions.
Previous to this patch all interned strings lived in their own malloc'd
chunk. On average this wastes N/2 bytes per interned string, where N is
the number-of-bytes for a quanta of the memory allocator (16 bytes on 32
bit archs).
With this patch interned strings are concatenated into the same malloc'd
chunk when possible. Such chunks are enlarged inplace when possible,
and shrunk to fit when a new chunk is needed.
RAM savings with this patch are highly varied, but should always show an
improvement (unless only 3 or 4 strings are interned). New version
typically uses about 70% of previous memory for the qstr data, and can
lead to savings of around 10% of total memory footprint of a running
script.
Costs about 120 bytes code size on Thumb2 archs (depends on how many
calls to gc_realloc are made).
I checked the entire codebase, and every place that vstr_init_len
was called, there was a call to mp_obj_new_str_from_vstr after it.
mp_obj_new_str_from_vstr always tries to reallocate a new buffer
1 byte larger than the original to store the terminating null
character.
In many cases, if we allocated the initial buffer to be 1 byte
longer, we can prevent this extra allocation, and just reuse
the originally allocated buffer.
Asking to read 256 bytes and only getting 100 will still cause
the extra allocation, but if you ask to read 256 and get 256
then the extra allocation will be optimized away.
Yes - the reallocation is optimized in the heap to try and reuse
the buffer if it can, but it takes quite a few cycles to figure
this out.
Note by Damien: vstr_init_len should now be considered as a
string-init convenience function and used only when creating
null-terminated objects.
Previous to this patch, if "abcd" and "ab" were possible completions
to tab-completing "a", then tab would expand to "abcd" straight away
if this identifier appeared first in the dict.
The TimeoutError is useful for some modules, specially the the
socket module. TimeoutError can then be alised to socket.timeout
and then Python code can differentiate between socket.error and
socket.timeout.
When "micropython -m pkg.mod" command was used, relative imports in pkg.mod
didn't work, because pkg.mod.__name__ was set to __main__, and the fact that
it's a package submodule was missed. This is an original workaround to this
issue. TODO: investigate and compare how CPython deals with this issue.
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.
mpconfigport.mk contains configuration options which affect the way
MicroPython is linked. In this regard, it's "stronger" configuration
dependency than even mpconfigport.h, so if we rebuild everything on
mpconfigport.h change, we certianly should of that on mpconfigport.mk
change too.
Damien George
Sebastian Plamauer
Dave Hylands
Paul Sokolovsky
Galen Hazelwood
Daniel Campora