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.
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.
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.
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.
- use a memory arena to store flat pointers so that the messed up cleanup can be avoided by deallocating this in bulk.
- added a new SO opcode to the VM to execute a write barrier. This is necessary for all objects that are not linked into one global table, i.e. everything except thinkers and class types.
- always use the cheaper LOS opcode for reading pointers to classes and defaults because these cannot be destroyed during normal operation.
- removed the pointless validation from String.Mid. If the values are read as unsigned the internal validation of FString::Mid will automatically ensure proper results.
If a later module reused an existing name for a different class or struct type, this new name would completely shadow the old one, even in the base files.
Changed it so that each compilation unit (i.e. each ZScript and DECORATE lump) get their own symbol table and can only see the symbol tables that got defined in lower numbered resource files so that later definitions do not pollute the available list of symbols when running the compiler backend and code generator - which happens after everything has been parsed.
Another effect of this is that a mod that reuses the name of an internal global constant will only see its own constant, again reducing the risk of potential errors in case the internal definitions add some new values.
Global constants are still discouraged from being used because what this does not and can not handle is the case that a mod defines a global constant with the same name as a class variable. In such a case the class variable will always take precedence for code inside that class.
Note that the internal struct String had to be renamed for this because the stricter checks did not let the type String pass on the left side of a '.' anymore.
- made PEnum inherit from PInt and not from PNamedType.
The old inheritance broke nearly every check for integer compatibility in the compiler, so this hopefully leads to a working enum implementation.
* completely scriptified DehackedPickup and FakeInventory.
* scriptified all remaining virtual functions of Inventory, so that its inheritance is now 100% script-side.
* scriptified CallTryPickup and most of the code called by that.
- fixed: Passing local variables by reference did not work in the VM.
- ensure that actor defaults contain a valid virtual table and class pointer so that they can actually use virtual and class-dependent method functions. This is needed for retrieving script variables from them.
- support transient object member variables for information that does not need to be put in a savegame.
- fixed: special initialization of objects needs to pass the proper defaults along, otherwise the parent classes will use their own, inappropriate one.
