It's much more efficient in RAM and code size to do implicit literal string
concatenation in the lexer, as opposed to the compiler.
RAM usage is reduced because the concatenation can be done right away in the
tokeniser by just accumulating the string/bytes literals into the lexer's
vstr. Prior to this patch adjacent strings/bytes would create a parse tree
(one node per string/bytes) and then in the compiler a whole new chunk of
memory was allocated to store the concatenated string, which used more than
double the memory compared to just accumulating in the lexer.
This patch also significantly reduces code size:
bare-arm: -204
minimal: -204
unix x64: -328
stmhal: -208
esp8266: -284
cc3200: -224
Previous to this patch there was an explicit check for errors with line
continuation (where backslash was not immediately followed by a newline).
But this check is not necessary: if there is an error then the remaining
logic of the tokeniser will reject the backslash and correctly produce a
syntax error.
Since the table of keywords is sorted, we can use strcmp to do the search
and stop part way through the search if the comparison is less-than.
Because all tokens that are names are subject to this search, this
optimisation will improve the overall speed of the lexer when processing
a script.
The change also decreases code size by a little bit because we now use
strcmp instead of the custom str_strn_equal function.
Keywords only needs to be searched for if the token is a MP_TOKEN_NAME, so
we can move the seach to the part of the code that does the tokenising for
MP_TOKEN_NAME.
Grammar rules have 2 variants: ones that are attached to a specific
compile function which is called to compile that grammar node, and ones
that don't have a compile function and are instead just inspected to see
what form they take.
In the compiler there is a table of all grammar rules, with each entry
having a pointer to the associated compile function. Those rules with no
compile function have a null pointer. There are 120 such rules, so that's
120 words of essentially wasted code space.
By grouping together the compile vs no-compile rules we can put all the
no-compile rules at the end of the list of rules, and then we don't need
to store the null pointers. We just have a truncated table and it's
guaranteed that when indexing this table we only index the first half,
the half with populated pointers.
This patch implements such a grouping by having a specific macro for the
compile vs no-compile grammar rules (DEF_RULE vs DEF_RULE_NC). It saves
around 460 bytes of code on 32-bit archs.
Allows to iterate over the following without allocating on the heap:
- tuple
- list
- string, bytes
- bytearray, array
- dict (not dict.keys, dict.values, dict.items)
- set, frozenset
Allows to call the following without heap memory:
- all, any, min, max, sum
TODO: still need to allocate stack memory in bytecode for iter_buf.
Damien George
Paul Sokolovsky