This patch compresses the second part of the bytecode prelude which
contains the source file name, function name, source-line-number mapping
and cell closure information. This part of the prelude now begins with a
single varible length unsigned integer which encodes 2 numbers, being the
byte-size of the following 2 sections in the header: the "source info
section" and the "closure section". After decoding this variable unsigned
integer it's possible to skip over one or both of these sections very
easily.
This scheme saves about 2 bytes for most functions compared to the original
format: one in the case that there are no closure cells, and one because
padding was eliminated.
The start of the bytecode prelude contains 6 numbers telling the amount of
stack needed for the Python values and exceptions, and the signature of the
function. Prior to this patch these numbers were all encoded one after the
other (2x variable unsigned integers, then 4x bytes), but using so many
bytes is unnecessary.
An entropy analysis of around 150,000 bytecode functions from the CPython
standard library showed that the optimal Shannon coding would need about
7.1 bits on average to encode these 6 numbers, compared to the existing 48
bits.
This patch attempts to get close to this optimal value by packing the 6
numbers into a single, varible-length unsigned integer via bit-wise
interleaving. The interleaving scheme is chosen to minimise the average
number of bytes needed, and at the same time keep the scheme simple enough
so it can be implemented without too much overhead in code size or speed.
The scheme requires about 10.5 bits on average to store the 6 numbers.
As a result most functions which originally took 6 bytes to encode these 6
numbers now need only 1 byte (in 80% of cases).
From the beginning of this project the RAISE_VARARGS opcode was named and
implemented following CPython, where it has an argument (to the opcode)
counting how many args the raise takes:
raise # 0 args (re-raise previous exception)
raise exc # 1 arg
raise exc from exc2 # 2 args (chained raise)
In the bytecode this operation therefore takes 2 bytes, one for
RAISE_VARARGS and one for the number of args.
This patch splits this opcode into 3, where each is now a single byte.
This reduces bytecode size by 1 byte for each use of raise. Every byte
counts! It also has the benefit of reducing code size (on all ports except
nanbox).
POP_BLOCK and POP_EXCEPT are now the same, and are always followed by a
JUMP. So this optimisation reduces code size, and RAM usage of bytecode by
two bytes for each try-except handler.
This patch allows the following code to run without allocating on the heap:
super().foo(...)
Before this patch such a call would allocate a super object on the heap and
then load the foo method and call it right away. The super object is only
needed to perform the lookup of the method and not needed after that. This
patch makes an optimisation to allocate the super object on the C stack and
discard it right after use.
Changes in code size due to this patch are:
bare-arm: +128
minimal: +232
unix x64: +416
unix nanbox: +364
stmhal: +184
esp8266: +340
cc3200: +128
The system printf is no longer used by the core uPy code. Instead, the
platform print stream or DEBUG_printf is used. Using DEBUG_printf in the
showbc functions would mean that the code can't be tested by the test
suite, so use the normal output instead.
This patch also fixes parsing of bytecode-line-number mappings.
With the previous patch combining 3 emit functions into 1, it now makes
sense to also combine the corresponding VM opcodes, which is what this
patch does. This eliminates 2 opcodes which simplifies the VM and reduces
code size, in bytes: bare-arm:44, minimal:64, unix(NDEBUG,x86-64):272,
stmhal:92, esp8266:200. Profiling (with a simple script that creates many
list/dict/set comprehensions) shows no measurable change in performance.
Fixes#1684 and makes "not" match Python semantics. The code is also
simplified (the separate MP_BC_NOT opcode is removed) and the patch saves
68 bytes for bare-arm/ and 52 bytes for minimal/.
Previously "not x" was implemented as !mp_unary_op(x, MP_UNARY_OP_BOOL),
so any given object only needs to implement MP_UNARY_OP_BOOL (and the VM
had a special opcode to do the ! bit).
With this patch "not x" is implemented as mp_unary_op(x, MP_UNARY_OP_NOT),
but this operation is caught at the start of mp_unary_op and dispatched as
!mp_obj_is_true(x). mp_obj_is_true has special logic to test for
truthness, and is the correct way to handle the not operation.
This allows the mp_obj_t type to be configured to something other than a
pointer-sized primitive type.
This patch also includes additional changes to allow the code to compile
when sizeof(mp_uint_t) != sizeof(void*), such as using size_t instead of
mp_uint_t, and various casts.
Main changes when MICROPY_PERSISTENT_CODE is enabled are:
- qstrs are encoded as 2-byte fixed width in the bytecode
- all pointers are removed from bytecode and put in const_table (this
includes const objects and raw code pointers)
Ultimately this option will enable persistence for not just bytecode but
also native code.
Previous to this patch each time a bytes object was referenced a new
instance (with the same data) was created. With this patch a single
bytes object is created in the compiler and is loaded directly at execute
time as a true constant (similar to loading bignum and float objects).
This saves on allocating RAM and means that bytes objects can now be
used when the memory manager is locked (eg in interrupts).
The MP_BC_LOAD_CONST_BYTES bytecode was removed as part of this.
Generated bytecode is slightly larger due to storing a pointer to the
bytes object instead of the qstr identifier.
Code size is reduced by about 60 bytes on Thumb2 architectures.
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.
Eg, "() + 1" now tells you that __add__ is not supported for tuple and
int types (before it just said the generic "binary operator"). We reuse
the table of names for slot lookup because it would be a waste of code
space to store the pretty name for each operator.
This is consistent with how BC_JUMP was handled before. We never show jumps
destinations relative to jump instrucion itself, only relative to beginning
of function. Another useful way to show them as absolute (real memory
address), and this change makes result expected and consistent with how
BC_JUMP is shown.
There is a lot potential in compress bytecodes and make more use of the
coding space. This patch introduces "multi" bytecodes which have their
argument included in the bytecode (by addition).
UNARY_OP and BINARY_OP now no longer take a 1 byte argument for the
opcode. Rather, the opcode is included in the first byte itself.
LOAD_FAST_[0,1,2] and STORE_FAST_[0,1,2] are removed in favour of their
multi versions, which can take an argument between 0 and 15 inclusive.
The majority of LOAD_FAST/STORE_FAST codes fit in this range and so this
saves a byte for each of these.
LOAD_CONST_SMALL_INT_MULTI is used to load small ints between -16 and 47
inclusive. Such ints are quite common and now only need 1 byte to
store, and now have much faster decoding.
In all this patch saves about 2% RAM for typically bytecode (1.8% on
64-bit test, 2.5% on pyboard test). It also reduces the binary size
(because bytecodes are simplified) and doesn't harm performance.
This saves a lot of RAM for 2 reasons:
1. For functions that don't have default values, var args or var kw
args (which is a large number of functions in the general case), the
mp_obj_fun_bc_t type now fits in 1 GC block (previously needed 2 because
of the extra pointer to point to the arg_names array). So this saves 16
bytes per function (32 bytes on 64-bit machines).
2. Combining separate memory regions generally saves RAM because the
unused bytes at the end of the GC block are saved for 1 of the blocks
(since that block doesn't exist on its own anymore). So generally this
saves 8 bytes per function.
Tested by importing lots of modules:
- 64-bit Linux gave about an 8% RAM saving for 86k of used RAM.
- pyboard gave about a 6% RAM saving for 31k of used RAM.
Code-info size, block name, source name, n_state and n_exc_stack now use
variable length encoded uints. This saves 7-9 bytes per bytecode
function for most functions.
Reduces by about a factor of 10 on average the amount of RAM needed to
store the line-number to bytecode map in the bytecode prelude.
Using CPython3.4's stdlib for statistics: previously, an average of
13 bytes were used per (bytecode offset, line-number offset) pair, and
now with this improvement, that's down to 1.3 bytes on average.
Large RAM usage before was due to some very large steps in line numbers,
both from the start of the first line in a function way down in the
file, and also functions that have big comments and/or big strings in
them (both cases were significant).
Although the savings are large on average for the CPython stdlib, it
won't have such a big effect for small scripts used in embedded
programming.
Addresses issue #648.
Damien George
Milan Rossa
Paul Sokolovsky
Alexander Steffen