Combining these two groups of data has been the cause of many hard to detect errors because it allowed liberal casting between types that are used for completely different things.
Having these two types related can cause problems with detection in the compiler because for some parts they need quite different handling.
Common handling for the fields has been moved into PSymbolTable but overall redundancy was quite minor as both types share surprisingly little functionality.
A pointer to an object has quite different semantics so let's do this with proper virtual inheritance. This should allow to simplify a lot of pointer related checks in the compiler.
- fixed: IsVisibleToPlayer and optimized it a bit more.
- moved SourceLumpName to PClass, so that it can also be used for non-actors (there's a lot of non-Actor classes already.)
- separated the serializer for PClassPointer from PPointer. Even though not doable, a pointer to a class type is something entirely different than a class pointer with a restriction so each should handle its own case.
- some optimization of access to OwnedStates in old DECORATE.
- consolidate all places that print a state name into a subfunction.
- allocate states from the ClassDataAllocator memory arena. States do not need to be freed separately from the rest of the static class data.
- block creation of actors with the 'new' instruction. Unlike the above these cannot be made abstract because without ConstructNative they cannot be serialized.
- made CameraHeight a modifiable actor property - it was readonly before.
- allow accessing the type constants from ZScript, this required quite a bit of explicit coding because the type system has no capabilities to search for basic types by name.
This will store class meta properties in a separate memory block so that it won't have to muck around with PClass - which made the implementation from the scripting branch relatively useless because extending the data wasn't particularly easy and also not well implemented. This can now be handled just like the defaults.
Like the symbols and the VM functions this is data that is static from startup until shutdown and has no need to be subjected to garbage collection. All things combined this reduces the amount of GC-sensitive objects at startup from 9600 to 600.
Making this an object had little to no advantage, except being able to remove the deleter code. Now, with some of the class data already being allocated in a memory arena so that freeing it is easier, this can also be used for the drop item lists which makes it unnecessary to subject them to the GC. This also merges the memory arenas for VM functions and flat pointers because both get deleted at the same time so they can share the same one.
Now all actors have the same metaclass and therefore it will always be the same size which will finally allow some needed changes to the type system which couldn't be done because it was occasionally necessary to replace tentatively created classes due to size mismatches.
Symbols are very easy to manage once they are in a symbol table and there's lots of them so this reduces the amount of work the GC needs to do quite considerably.
After cleaning out compile-time-only symbols there will still be more than 2000 left, one for each function and one for each member variable of a class or struct.
This means more than 2000 object that won't need to tracked constantly by the garbage collector.
Note that loose fields which do occur during code generation will be GC'd just as before.
- removed all pointer declarations to types from the symbols. All types must be placed into the type table which means that they can be considered static.
As it stood, just compiling the internal ZScript code created more than 9000 DObjects, none of which really need to be subjected to garbage collection, aside from allowing lazy deallocation.
This puts an incredible drag on the garbage collector which often needs several minutes to finish processing before actual deletion can start.
The VM functions with roughly 1800 of these objects were by far the easiest to refactor so they are now. They also use a memory arena now which significantly reduces their memory footprint.
All non-actors now use PClass exclusively as their type descriptor.
Getting rid of these two classes already removes a lot of obtuse code from the type system, but there's still three more classes to go before a major cleanup can be undertaken.
Removing this variable is needed to remove PClassType and PClassClass as the next step to eliminate all of PClass's subclasses in order to clean up the type system.
