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The idea here is that there's a moderate amount of ROM used up by exception
text. Obviously we try to keep the messages short, and the code can enable
terse errors, but it still adds up. Listed below is the total string data
size for various ports:
bare-arm 2860
minimal 2876
stm32 8926 (PYBV11)
cc3200 3751
esp32 5721
This commit implements compression of these strings. It takes advantage of
the fact that these strings are all 7-bit ascii and extracts the top 128
frequently used words from the messages and stores them packed (dropping
their null-terminator), then uses (0x80 | index) inside strings to refer to
these common words. Spaces are automatically added around words, saving
more bytes. This happens transparently in the build process, mirroring the
steps that are used to generate the QSTR data. The MP_COMPRESSED_ROM_TEXT
macro wraps any literal string that should compressed, and it's
automatically decompressed in mp_decompress_rom_string.
There are many schemes that could be used for the compression, and some are
included in py/makecompresseddata.py for reference (space, Huffman, ngram,
common word). Results showed that the common-word compression gets better
results. This is before counting the increased cost of the Huffman
decoder. This might be slightly counter-intuitive, but this data is
extremely repetitive at a word-level, and the byte-level entropy coder
can't quite exploit that as efficiently. Ideally one would combine both
approaches, but for now the common-word approach is the one that is used.
For additional comparison, the size of the raw data compressed with gzip
and zlib is calculated, as a sort of proxy for a lower entropy bound. With
this scheme we come within 15% on stm32, and 30% on bare-arm (i.e. we use
x% more bytes than the data compressed with gzip -- not counting the code
overhead of a decoder, and how this would be hypothetically implemented).
The feature is disabled by default and can be enabled by setting
MICROPY_ROM_TEXT_COMPRESSION at the Makefile-level.
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