Unfortunately, these timeouts are the only realiable way (for now), to
be able to detect broken connections due to half-open sockets. Such a
thing occurs when getting out of the WiFi coverage area or when
disconnecting from the AP (sometimes the client doesn't send the
disconnect packet).
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.
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.
Daniel Campora
Damien George
Paul Sokolovsky
danicampora