This commit adds pluggable consensus engines to go-ethereum. In short, it
introduces a generic consensus interface, and refactors the entire codebase to
use this interface.
This PR implements a differenceIterator, which allows iterating over trie nodes
that exist in one trie but not in another. This is a prerequisite for most GC
strategies, in order to find obsolete nodes.
* trie: store nodes as pointers
This avoids memory copies when unwrapping node interface values.
name old time/op new time/op delta
Get 388ns ± 8% 215ns ± 2% -44.56% (p=0.000 n=15+15)
GetDB 363ns ± 3% 202ns ± 2% -44.21% (p=0.000 n=15+15)
UpdateBE 1.57µs ± 2% 1.29µs ± 3% -17.80% (p=0.000 n=13+15)
UpdateLE 1.92µs ± 2% 1.61µs ± 2% -16.25% (p=0.000 n=14+14)
HashBE 2.16µs ± 6% 2.18µs ± 6% ~ (p=0.436 n=15+15)
HashLE 7.43µs ± 3% 7.21µs ± 3% -2.96% (p=0.000 n=15+13)
* trie: close temporary databases in GetDB benchmark
* trie: don't keep []byte from DB load around
Nodes decoded from a DB load kept hashes and values as sub-slices of
the DB value. This can be a problem because loading from leveldb often
returns []byte with a cap that's larger than necessary, increasing
memory usage.
* trie: unload old cached nodes
* trie, core/state: use cache unloading for account trie
* trie: use explicit private flags (fixes Go 1.5 reflection issue).
* trie: fixup cachegen overflow at request of nick
* core/state: rename journal size constant
