go vet is not happy about them:
pkg/io/binaryReader.go:92:21: method ReadByte() byte should have signature ReadByte() (byte, error)
pkg/io/binaryWriter.go:75:21: method WriteByte(u8 byte) should have signature WriteByte(byte) error
This seriously improves the serialization/deserialization performance for
several reasons:
* no time spent in `binary` reflection
* no memory allocations being made on every read/write
* uses fast ReadBytes everywhere it's appropriate
It also makes Fixed8 Serializable just for convenience.
It reduces heap pressure a little for these elements as we don't have to
allocate/free them individually. And they're directly tied to transactions or
block, not being shared or anything like that, so it makes little sense for
them to be pointer-based. It only makes building transactions a little easier,
but that's obviously a minor usecase.
Before this patch on block import we could easily be spending more than 6
seconds out of 30 in Uint256 encoding for UnspentBalance, now it's completely
off the radar.
Drop wif.GetVerificationScript(), drop
smartcontract.CreateSignatureRedeemScript(), add GetVerificationScript()
directly to the PublicKey and use it everywhere.
This allows easier reuse of opcodes and in some cases allows to eliminate
dependencies on the whole vm package, like in compiler that only needs opcodes
and doesn't care about VM for any other purpose.
And yes, they're opcodes because an instruction is a whole thing with
operands, that's what context.Next() returns.
