laconicd-deprecated/docs/core/state_snapshot.md
yihuang 8bcab7be27
docs: state revert logic (#421)
Closes #356

Co-authored-by: Federico Kunze Küllmer <31522760+fedekunze@users.noreply.github.com>
2021-09-13 13:01:44 +00:00

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# Snapshot and Revert in Ethermint
EVM uses state-reverting exceptions to handle errors. Such an exception will undo all changes made to the state in the current call (and all its sub-calls), and the caller could handle the error and don't propagate. We need to implement the `Snapshot` and `RevertToSnapshot` apis in `StateDB` interfaces to support this feature.
[go-ethereum implementation](https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/blob/master/core/state/journal.go#L39) manages transient states in memory, and uses a list of journal logs to record all the state modification operations done so far, snapshot is an index in the log list, and to revert to a snapshot it just undo the journal logs after the snapshot index in reversed order.
Ethermint uses cosmos-sdk's storage api to manage states, fortunately the storage api supports creating cached overlays, it works like this:
```golang
// create a cached overlay storage on top of ctx storage.
overlayCtx, commit := ctx.CacheContext()
// Modify states using the overlayed storage
err := doCall(overlayCtx)
if err != nil {
return err
}
// commit will write the dirty states into the underlying storage
commit()
// Now, just drop the overlayCtx and keep using ctx
```
And it can be used in a nested way, like this:
```golang
overlayCtx1, commit1 := ctx.CacheContext()
doCall1(overlayCtx1)
{
overlayCtx2, commit2 := overlayCtx1.CacheContext()
doCall2(overlayCtx2)
commit2()
}
commit1()
```
With this feature, we can use a stake of overlayed contexts to implement nested `Snapshot` and `RevertToSnapshot` calls.
```golang
type cachedContext struct {
ctx sdk.Context
commit func()
}
var contextStack []cachedContext
func Snapshot() int {
ctx, commit := contextStack.Top().CacheContext()
contextStack.Push(cachedContext{ctx, commit})
return len(contextStack) - 1
}
func RevertToSnapshot(int snapshot) {
contextStack = contextStack[:snapshot]
}
func Commit() {
for i := len(contextStack) - 1; i >= 0; i-- {
contextStack[i].commit()
}
contextStack = {}
}
```