The index attributes have been uint8_t for a while, so there is no point
in using int for local variables. This should allow the compiler to
generate slightly more efficient code, but (at least on gcc 4.8.2) it
also confuses the register allocator, causing this change to increase
code size by 2 bytes instead due to extra push/pop instructions (but
this will probably change in the future if the compiler improves).
Switch the tx and rx buffer head/tail entries in the HardwareSerial
initialisation list so that they match the order the fields are defined
in. This fixes a compiler warning (repeated for each of the
HardwareSerial source files the header is used in).
This helps improve the effective datarate on high (>500kbit/s) bitrates,
by skipping the interrupt and associated overhead. At 1 Mbit/s the
implementation previously got up to about 600-700 kbit/s, but now it
actually gets up to the 1Mbit/s (values are rough estimates, though).
Moreover, declaring pointers-to-registers as const and using initializer
list in class constructor allows the compiler to further improve inlining
performance.
This change recovers about 50 bytes of program space on single-UART devices.
See #1711
By putting the ISRs and HardwareSerial instance for each instance in a
separate compilation unit, the compile will only consider them for
linking when the instance is actually used. The ISR is always referenced
by the compiler runtime and the Serialx_available() function is always
referenced by SerialEventRun(), but both references are weak and thus do
not cause the compilation to be included in the link by themselves.
The effect of this is that when multiple HardwareSerial ports are
available, but not all are used, buffers are only allocated and ISRs are
only included for the serial ports that are used. On the mega, this
lowers memory usage from 653 bytes to just 182 when only using the first
serial port.
On boards with just a single port, there is no change, since the code
and memory was already left out when no serial port was used at all.
This fixes#1425 and fixes#1259.
