Instead of doing everything in the interrupt lowering pass, generate
some more code in gen-device to declare interrupt handler functions and
do some work in the compiler so that interrupt lowering becomes a lot
simpler.
This has several benefits:
- Overall code is smaller, in particular the interrupt lowering pass.
- The code should be a bit less "magical" and instead a bit easier to
read. In particular, instead of having a magic
runtime.callInterruptHandler (that is fully written by the interrupt
lowering pass), the runtime calls a generated function like
device/sifive.InterruptHandler where this switch already exists in
code.
- Debug information is improved. This can be helpful during actual
debugging but is also useful for other uses of DWARF debug
information.
For an example on debug information improvement, this is what a
backtrace might look like before this commit:
Breakpoint 1, 0x00000b46 in UART0_IRQHandler ()
(gdb) bt
#0 0x00000b46 in UART0_IRQHandler ()
#1 <signal handler called>
[..etc]
Notice that the debugger doesn't see the source code location where it
has stopped.
After this commit, breaking at the same line might look like this:
Breakpoint 1, (*machine.UART).handleInterrupt (arg1=..., uart=<optimized out>) at /home/ayke/src/github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/src/machine/machine_nrf.go:200
200 uart.Receive(byte(nrf.UART0.RXD.Get()))
(gdb) bt
#0 (*machine.UART).handleInterrupt (arg1=..., uart=<optimized out>) at /home/ayke/src/github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/src/machine/machine_nrf.go:200
#1 UART0_IRQHandler () at /home/ayke/src/github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/src/device/nrf/nrf51.go:176
#2 <signal handler called>
[..etc]
By now, the debugger sees an actual source location for UART0_IRQHandler
(in the generated file) and an inlined function.
Previously, the RAM was set to start at address 0. This is incorrect: on
AVR, the first few addresses are taken up by memory-mapped I/O. The
reason this didn't lead to problems (yet) was because the stack was
usually big enough to avoid real problems.
This commit lets the compiler know about interrupts and allows
optimizations to be performed based on that: interrupts are eliminated
when they appear to be unused in a program. This is done with a new
pseudo-call (runtime/interrupt.New) that is treated specially by the
compiler.
This brings a big speedup. Not counting gofmt time,
`make gen-device-avr` became about 3x faster. In the future, it might be
an idea to generate the AST in-memory and write it out already
formatted.
