Previous to this patch the printing mechanism was a bit of a tangled
mess. This patch attempts to consolidate printing into one interface.
All (non-debug) printing now uses the mp_print* family of functions,
mainly mp_printf. All these functions take an mp_print_t structure as
their first argument, and this structure defines the printing backend
through the "print_strn" function of said structure.
Printing from the uPy core can reach the platform-defined print code via
two paths: either through mp_sys_stdout_obj (defined pert port) in
conjunction with mp_stream_write; or through the mp_plat_print structure
which uses the MP_PLAT_PRINT_STRN macro to define how string are printed
on the platform. The former is only used when MICROPY_PY_IO is defined.
With this new scheme printing is generally more efficient (less layers
to go through, less arguments to pass), and, given an mp_print_t*
structure, one can call mp_print_str for efficiency instead of
mp_printf("%s", ...). Code size is also reduced by around 200 bytes on
Thumb2 archs.
With this patch str/bytes construction is streamlined. Always use a
vstr to build a str/bytes object. If the size is known beforehand then
use vstr_init_len to allocate only required memory. Otherwise use
vstr_init and the vstr will grow as needed. Then use
mp_obj_new_str_from_vstr to create a str/bytes object using the vstr
memory.
Saves code ROM: 68 bytes on stmhal, 108 bytes on bare-arm, and 336 bytes
on unix x64.
Damien George