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.
The Cortex-M architecture contains two stack pointers, designed to be
used by RTOSes: MSP and PSP (where MSP is the default at reset). In
fact, the ARM documentation recommends using the PSP for tasks in a
RTOS.
This commit switches to using the PSP for goroutine stacks. Aside from
being the recommended operation, this has the big advantage that the
NVIC automatically switches to the MSP when handling interrupts. This
avoids having to make every goroutine stack big enough that interrupts
can be handled on it.
Additionally, I've optimized the assembly code to save/restore registers
(made possible by this change). For Cortex-M3 and up, saving all
registers is just a single push instruction and restoring+branching is a
single pop instruction. For Cortex-M0 it's a bit more work because the
push/pop instructions there don't support most high registers.
Sidenote: the fact that you can pop a number of registers and branch at
the same time makes ARM not exactly a true RISC system. However, it's
very useful in this case.
A bug was introduced in the previous commit that led to miscompilations
in the time.Sleep function when the scheduler was disabled, because
time.Sleep (implemented in the runtime) tried to switch to the scheduler
stack.
This commit restores the binary size of most examples to what it was
before, but still reduces static RAM consumption (.bss) slightly. This
gives me some confidence that it does indeed fix the introduced bug.
This scheduler is intended to live along the (stackless) coroutine based
scheduler which is needed for WebAssembly and unsupported platforms. The
stack based scheduler is somewhat simpler in implementation as it does
not require full program transform passes and supports things like
function pointers and interface methods out of the box with no changes.
Code size is reduced in most cases, even in the case where no scheduler
scheduler is used at all. I'm not exactly sure why but these changes
likely allowed some further optimizations somewhere. Even RAM is
slightly reduced, perhaps some global was elminated in the process as
well.
