## Issue Addressed
N/A
## Proposed Changes
- Removing a bunch of unnecessary references
- Updated `Error::VariantError` to `Error::Variant`
- There were additional enum variant lints that I ignored, because I thought our variant names were fine
- removed `MonitoredValidator`'s `pubkey` field, because I couldn't find it used anywhere. It looks like we just use the string version of the pubkey (the `id` field) if there is no index
## Additional Info
Co-authored-by: realbigsean <seananderson33@gmail.com>
## Proposed Changes
Modify the SHA256 implementation in `eth2_hashing` so that it switches between `ring` and `sha2` to take advantage of [x86_64 SHA extensions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_SHA_extensions). The extensions are available on modern Intel and AMD CPUs, and seem to provide a considerable speed-up: on my Ryzen 5950X it dropped state tree hashing times by about 30% from 35ms to 25ms (on Prater).
## Additional Info
The extensions became available in the `sha2` crate [last year](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/hf2vcx/ann_rustcryptos_sha1_and_sha2_now_support/), and are not available in Ring, which uses a [pure Rust implementation of sha2](https://github.com/briansmith/ring/blob/main/src/digest/sha2.rs). Ring is faster on CPUs that lack the extensions so I've implemented a runtime switch to use `sha2` only when the extensions are available. The runtime switching seems to impose a miniscule penalty (see the benchmarks linked below).
## Proposed Changes
Implement the consensus changes necessary for the upcoming Altair hard fork.
## Additional Info
This is quite a heavy refactor, with pivotal types like the `BeaconState` and `BeaconBlock` changing from structs to enums. This ripples through the whole codebase with field accesses changing to methods, e.g. `state.slot` => `state.slot()`.
Co-authored-by: realbigsean <seananderson33@gmail.com>
## Issue Addressed
NA
## Proposed Changes
- Panic or return error if we overflow `usize` in SSZ decoding/encoding derive macros.
- I claim that the panics can only be triggered by a faulty type definition in lighthouse, they cannot be triggered externally on a validly defined struct.
- Use `Ordering` instead of some `if` statements, as demanded by clippy.
- Remove some old clippy `allow` that seem to no longer be required.
- Add comments to interesting clippy statements that we're going to continue to ignore.
- Create #1713
## Additional Info
NA
