After testing with a savegame on ZDCMP2 which is probably the largest map in existence, timing both methods resulted in a speed difference of less than 40 ms (70 vs 110 ms for reading all sectory, linedefs, sidedefs and objects).
This compares to an overall restoration time, including reloading the level, precaching all textures and setting everything up, of approx. 1.2 s, meaning an increase of 3% of the entire reloading time.
That's simply not worth all the negative side effects that may happen with a method that highly depends on proper code construction.
On the other hand, using random access means that a savegame version change is only needed now when the semantics of a field change, but not if some get added or deleted.
- do not I_Error out in the serializer unless caused by a programming error.
It is better to let the serializer finish, collect all the errors and I_Error out when the game is known to be in a stable enough state to allow unwinding.
The only reason this even existed was that ZDoom's original VC projects used __fastcall. The CMake generated project do not, they stick to __cdecl.
Since no performance gain can be seen by using __fastcall the best course of action is to just remove all traces of it from the source and forget that it ever existed.
- Values are tagged to allow for some measure of changing variable types
without automatically breaking savegames.
- Use these new methods to serialize the non-native variables in an
object. This allows for achiving non-ints.
- Don't bother keeping track of uncompiled nodes in a special table. Use
the regular symbol table instead. This should in the future make
compiling nodes referenced deeper than (and before) their definitions
fairly straightforward.
- Also, break up the compiler's Message() function into Warn() and Error()
and get rid of zcc_errors.h. I can't really see having a set of error
numbers being useful.
- I don't remember why I thought using PPointer as the metatype for
PClassPointer would be preferable, but it means that PPointer's MatchID
can potentially be called for PClassPointer entries.
- The A_Jump family of action functions now return the state to jump
to (NULL if no jump is to be taken) instead of jumping directly.
It is the caller's responsibility to handle the jump. This will
make it possible to use their results in if statements and
do something other than jump.
- DECORATE return statements can now return the result of a function
(but not any random expression--it must be a function call). To
make a jump happen from inside a multi-action block, you must
return the value of an A_Jump function. e.g.:
{ return A_Jump(128, "SomeState"); }
- The VMFunction class now contains its prototype instead of storing
it at a higher level in PFunction. This is so that
FState::CallAction can easily tell if a function returns a state.
- Removed the FxTailable class because with explicit return
statements, it's not useful anymore.
This requires quite a bit more thorough cleanup. I got it to the point where the titlepic appears after restarting, but it still crashes when starting the game so there's more data that needs to be cleaned up...
- Fixed: PType::FindConversion() gave all but the source type a distance of
0, so it only ever returned just one step of a route that requires more
than one step.
- PType::FindConversion() can find a path to convert one type to another.
This is completely generic and can handle any number of conversion
functions.
- I can't believe I completely forgot to let the parser handle true and
false literals.
- Consolidate all the %include blocks in zcc-parse.lemon into a single
one, because Lemon all of a sudden decided it didn't like me having more
than one in the grammar file.
- Added a PBool type to represent boolean values with.
- Added TypeVoid for statements, which produce no type.
- Added TypeError for expressions whose arguments are incompatible.
- Pointers now derive from PBasicType instead of PInt. Since they have their own register sets in the VM, this seems to make more sense than treating them as integers.
- Constants can be strings, but the existing PSymbolConst couldn't handle
them. The old PSymbolConst is now PSymbolConstNumeric, and the new
PSymbolConst is a now a baseclass for it and PSymbolConstString.
- The type systems used by PField and FxExpression are completely
incompatible, but I think I got the differences taken care of as far
as ParseNativeVariable(), ParseUserVariable(), and FxClassMember are
concerned.
- Support for declaring native bool variables has been removed for the time
being. It wasn't used anyway.
- Removed PSymbolVariable.
