This patch introduces the MICROPY_ENABLE_PYSTACK option (disabled by
default) which enables a "Python stack" that allows to allocate and free
memory in a scoped, or Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) way, similar to alloca().
A new memory allocation API is introduced along with this Py-stack. It
includes both "local" and "nonlocal" LIFO allocation. Local allocation is
intended to be equivalent to using alloca(), whereby the same function must
free the memory. Nonlocal allocation is where another function may free
the memory, so long as it's still LIFO.
Follow-up patches will convert all uses of alloca() and VLA to the new
scoped allocation API. The old behaviour (using alloca()) will still be
available, but when MICROPY_ENABLE_PYSTACK is enabled then alloca() is no
longer required or used.
The benefits of enabling this option are (or will be once subsequent
patches are made to convert alloca()/VLA):
- Toolchains without alloca() can use this feature to obtain correct and
efficient scoped memory allocation (compared to using the heap instead
of alloca(), which is slower).
- Even if alloca() is available, enabling the Py-stack gives slightly more
efficient use of stack space when calling nested Python functions, due to
the way that compilers implement alloca().
- Enabling the Py-stack with the stackless mode allows for even more
efficient stack usage, as well as retaining high performance (because the
heap is no longer used to build and destroy stackless code states).
- With Py-stack and stackless enabled, Python-calling-Python is no longer
recursive in the C mp_execute_bytecode function.
The micropython.pystack_use() function is included to measure usage of the
Python stack.
This adds a new configuration option to print runtime warnings and errors to
stderr. On Unix, CPython prints warnings and unhandled exceptions to stderr,
so the unix port here is configured to use this option.
The unix port already printed unhandled exceptions on the main thread to
stderr. This patch fixes unhandled exceptions on other threads and warnings
(issue #2838) not printing on stderr.
Additionally, a couple tests needed to be fixed to handle this new behavior.
This is done by also capturing stderr when running tests.
This patch changes mp_uint_t to size_t for the len argument of the
following public facing C functions:
mp_obj_tuple_get
mp_obj_list_get
mp_obj_get_array
These functions take a pointer to the len argument (to be filled in by the
function) and callers of these functions should update their code so the
type of len is changed to size_t. For ports that don't use nan-boxing
there should be no change in generate code because the size of the type
remains the same (word sized), and in a lot of cases there won't even be a
compiler warning if the type remains as mp_uint_t.
The reason for this change is to standardise on the use of size_t for
variables that count memory (or memory related) sizes/lengths. It helps
builds that use nan-boxing.
Each threads needs to have its own private references to its current
locals/globals dicts, otherwise functions running within different
contexts (eg imported from different files) can behave very strangely.
It's more efficient using the system mutexs instead of synthetic ones with
a busy-wait loop. The system can do proper scheduling and blocking of the
threads waiting on the mutex.
Damien George