The motivation for this is that allocating and clearing symbol tables is a common operation, especially with C99+, where a construct like "if (...) { ... }" involves three levels of scope with their own symbol tables. In some tests, it could take an appreciable fraction of total execution time (sometimes ~10%).
This patch allows symbol tables that have already been allocated and cleared to be reused for a subsequent scope, as long as they are still empty. It does this by maintaining a pool of empty symbol tables and taking one from there rather than allocating a new one when possible.
We impose a somewhat arbitrary limit of MaxBlock/150000 on the number of symbol tables we keep, to avoid filling up memory with them. It would probably be better to use purgeable handles here, but that would be a little more work, and this should be good enough for now.
Static initialization of arrays/structs/unions now essentially "executes" the initializer records to fill in a buffer (and keep track of relocations), then emits pcode to represent that initialized state. This supports overlapping and out-of-order initializer records, as can be produced by designated initialization.
Stephen Heumann
mikew50