Commit Graph

5 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Felix Lange
96fb839133
rlp: improve nil pointer handling (#20064)
* 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.
2019-09-13 11:10:57 +02:00
Felix Lange
bfbcfbe4a9 all: fix license headers one more time
I forgot to update one instance of "go-ethereum" in commit 3f047be5a.
2015-07-23 18:35:11 +02:00
Felix Lange
3f047be5aa all: update license headers to distiguish GPL/LGPL
All code outside of cmd/ is licensed as LGPL. The headers
now reflect this by calling the whole work "the go-ethereum library".
2015-07-22 18:51:45 +02:00
Felix Lange
ea54283b30 all: update license information 2015-07-07 14:12:44 +02:00
Felix Lange
552f5b2693 rlp: add functions for encoding
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.
2015-01-15 11:00:19 +01:00