This changes the CI / release builds to use the latest Go version. It also
upgrades golangci-lint to a newer version compatible with Go 1.19.
In Go 1.19, godoc has gained official support for links and lists. The
syntax for code blocks in doc comments has changed and now requires a
leading tab character. gofmt adapts comments to the new syntax
automatically, so there are a lot of comment re-formatting changes in this
PR. We need to apply the new format in order to pass the CI lint stage with
Go 1.19.
With the linter upgrade, I have decided to disable 'gosec' - it produces
too many false-positive warnings. The 'deadcode' and 'varcheck' linters
have also been removed because golangci-lint warns about them being
unmaintained. 'unused' provides similar coverage and we already have it
enabled, so we don't lose much with this change.
This adds support for a new struct tag "optional". Using this tag, structs used
for RLP encoding/decoding can be extended in a backwards-compatible way,
by adding new fields at the end.
* 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.
