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).
inet_pton supports both ipv4 and ipv6 addresses. Interface is also extensible
for other address families, but underlying libc inet_pton() function isn't
really extensible (e.g., it doesn't return length of binary address, i.e. it's
really hardcoded to AF_INET and AF_INET6). But anyway, on Python side, we could
extend it to support other addresses.
sendto() turns out to be mandatory function to work with UDP. It may seem
that connect(addr) + send() would achieve the same effect, but what connect()
appears to do is to set source address filter on a socket to its argument.
Then everything falls apart: socket sends to a broad-/multi-cast address,
but reply is sent from real peer address, which doesn't match filter set
by connect(), so local socket never sees a reply.
This requires root access. And on recent Linux kernels, with
CONFIG_STRICT_DEVMEM option enabled, only address ranges listed in
/proc/iomem can be accessed. The above compiled-time option can be
however overriden with boot-time option "iomem=relaxed".
This also removed separate read/write paths - there unlikely would
be a case when they're different.