This change further improves the performance of RLP encoding by removing
allocations for big.Int and [...]byte types. I have added a new benchmark
that measures RLP encoding of types.Block to verify that performance is
improved.
# Conflicts:
# core/types/block_test.go
# rlp/encode.go
# rlp/encode_test.go
* rlp: improve nil pointer handling
In both encoder and decoder, the rules for encoding nil pointers were a
bit hard to understand, and didn't leave much choice. Since RLP allows
two empty values (empty list, empty string), any protocol built on RLP
must choose either of these values to represent the null value in a
certain context.
This change adds choice in the form of two new struct tags, "nilString"
and "nilList". These can be used to specify how a nil pointer value is
encoded. The "nil" tag still exists, but its implementation is now
explicit and defines exactly how nil pointers are handled in a single
place.
Another important change in this commit is how nil pointers and the
Encoder interface interact. The EncodeRLP method was previously called
even on nil values, which was supposed to give users a choice of how
their value would be handled when nil. It turns out this is a stupid
idea. If you create a network protocol containing an object defined in
another package, it's better to be able to say that the object should be
a list or string when nil in the definition of the protocol message
rather than defining the encoding of nil on the object itself.
As of this commit, the encoding rules for pointers now take precedence
over the Encoder interface rule. I think the "nil" tag will work fine
for most cases. For special kinds of objects which are a struct in Go
but strings in RLP, code using the object can specify the desired
encoding of nil using the "nilString" and "nilList" tags.
* rlp: propagate struct field type errors
If a struct contained fields of undecodable type, the encoder and
decoder would panic instead of returning an error. Fix this by
propagating type errors in makeStruct{Writer,Decoder} and add a test.
These changes fix two corner cases related to internal handling of types
in package rlp: The "tail" struct tag can only be applied to the last field.
The check for this was wrong and didn't allow for private fields after the
field with the tag. Unsupported types (e.g. structs containing int) which
implement either the Encoder or Decoder interface but not both
couldn't be encoded/decoded.
Also fixes#19367
The rules have changed as follows:
* When decoding into pointers, empty values no longer produce
a nil pointer. This can be overriden for struct fields using the
struct tag "nil".
* When decoding into structs, the input list must contain an element
for each field.
I'm reasonably confident that the encoding matches the output of
ethutil.Encode for values that it supports. Some of the tests have been
adpated from the Ethereum testing repository.
There are still TODOs in the code.
