Previously we used the i386 target, probably with all optional features
disabled. However, the Pentium 4 has been released a _long_ time ago and
it seems reasonable to me to take that as a minimum requirement.
Upstream Go now also seems to move in this direction:
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/40255
The main motivation for this is that there were floating point issues
when running the tests for the math package:
GOARCH=386 tinygo test math
I haven't investigated what's the issue, but I strongly suspect it's
caused by the weird x87 80-bit floating point format. This could perhaps
be fixed in a different way (by setting the FPU precision to 64 bits)
but I figured that just setting the minimum requirement to the Pentium 4
would probably be fine. If needed, we can respect the GO386 environment
variable to support these very old CPUs.
To support this newer CPU, I had to make sure that the stack is aligned
to 16 bytes everywhere. This was not yet always the case.
This results in smaller and likely more efficient code. It does require
some architecture specific code for each architecture, but I've kept the
amount of code as small as possible.
This distinction was useful before when reflect wasn't properly
supported. Back then it made sense to only include method sets that were
actually used in an interface. But now that it is possible to get to
other values (for example, by extracting fields from structs) and it is
possible to turn them back into interfaces, it is necessary to preserve
all method sets that can possibly be used in the program in a type
assert, interface assert or interface method call.
In the future, this logic will need to be revisited again when
reflect.New or reflect.Zero gets implemented.
Code size increases a bit in some cases, but usually in a very limited
way (except for one outlier in the drivers smoke tests). The next commit
will improve the situation significantly.
This commit switches from the previous behavior of compiling the whole
program at once, to compiling every package in parallel and linking the
LLVM bitcode files together for further whole-program optimization.
This is a small performance win, but it has several advantages in the
future:
- There are many more things that can be done per package in parallel,
avoiding the bottleneck at the end of the compiler phase. This
should speed up the compiler futher.
- This change is a necessary step towards a non-LTO build mode for
fast incremental builds that only rebuild the changed package, when
compiler speed is more important than binary size.
- This change refactors the compiler in such a way that it will be
easier to inspect the IR for one package only. Inspecting this IR
will be very helpful for compiler developers.
I have chosed to call this implementation `esp8266` instead of `xtensa`
as it has been written specifically for the ESP8266 and there are no
other Xtensa chips with the CALL0 ABI (no windowing) that I know of. The
only other related chip is the ESP32, which does implement register
windowing and thus needs a very different implementation.
This has been a *lot* of work, trying to understand the Xtensa windowed
registers ABI. But in the end I managed to come up with a very simple
implementation that so far seems to work very well.
I tested this with both blinky examples (with blinky2 slightly edited)
and ./testdata/coroutines.go to verify that it actually works.
Most development happened on the ESP32 QEMU fork from Espressif
(https://github.com/espressif/qemu/wiki) but I also verified that it
works on a real ESP32.
The Cortex-M target isn't much changed, but much of the logic for the
AVR stack switcher that was previously in assembly has now been moved to
Go to make it more maintainable and in fact smaller in code size. Three
functions (tinygo_getCurrentStackPointer, tinygo_switchToTask,
tinygo_switchToScheduler) have been changed to one: tinygo_swapTask.
This reduction in assembly code should make the code more maintainable
and should make it easier to port stack switching to other
architectures.
I've also moved the assembly files to src/internal/task, which seems
like a more appropriate location to me.
This is a big change that will determine the stack size for many
goroutines automatically. Functions that aren't recursive and don't call
function pointers can in many cases have an automatically determined
worst case stack size. This is useful, as the stack size is usually much
lower than the previous hardcoded default of 1024 bytes: somewhere
around 200-500 bytes is common.
A side effect of this change is that the default stack sizes (including
the stack size for other architectures such as AVR) can now be changed
in the config JSON file, making it tunable per application.
While adding some code to clear the Next field when popping from a task stack for safety reasons, the clear was placed outside of a nil pointer check.
As a result, (*internal/task.Stack).Pop panicked when the Stack is empty.
This is the kind that is used in Go (actually CGo) for exporting
functions. I think it's best to use //export instead of our custom
//go:export pragma, for consistency (they are equivalent in TinyGo).
Therefore I've updated all instances to the standard format (except for
two that are updated in https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/pull/1024).
No smoke tests changed (when comparing the output hash), except for some
wasm tests that include DWARF debug info and tend to be flaky anyway.
This adds support for the `-scheduler=tasks` flag for AVR. On most AVR
chips you wouldn't want to run a real scheduler but it may be useful in
some cases, especially on devices with more RAM. It is disabled by
default.
