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.
Previous to this patch, a big-int, float or imag constant was interned
(made into a qstr) and then parsed at runtime to create an object each
time it was needed. This is wasteful in RAM and not efficient. Now,
these constants are parsed straight away in the parser and turned into
objects. This allows constants with large numbers of digits (so
addresses issue #1103) and takes us a step closer to #722.
This cleans up vstr so that it's a pure "variable buffer", and the user
can decide whether they need to add a terminating null byte. In most
places where vstr is used, the vstr did not need to be null terminated
and so this patch saves code size, a tiny bit of RAM, and makes vstr
usage more efficient. When null termination is needed it must be
done explicitly using vstr_null_terminate.
Damien George