Blender Git Commit Log

Support evaluating simple driver expressions without Python interpreter.

Recently @sergey found that hard-coding evaluation of certain very
common driver expressions without calling the Python interpreter
produces a 30-40% performance improvement. Since hard-coding is
obviously not suitable for production, I implemented a proper
parser and interpreter for simple arithmetic expressions in C.

The evaluator supports +, -, *, /, (), ==, !=, <, <=, >, >=,
and, or, not, ternary if; driver variables, frame, pi, True, False,
and a subset of standard math functions that seem most useful.

Booleans are represented as numbers, since within the supported
operation set it seems to be impossible to distinguish True/False
from 1.0/0.0. Boolean operations properly implement lazy evaluation
with jumps, and comparisons support chaining like 'a < b < c...'.

Expressions are parsed into a very simple stack machine program
that can then be safely evaluated in multiple threads.

Reviewers: sergey, campbellbarton

Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3698