/* Package mpt implements MPT (Merkle-Patricia Trie). An MPT stores key-value pairs and is a trie over 16-symbol alphabet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie A trie is a tree where values are stored in leafs and keys are paths from the root to the leaf node. An MPT consists of 4 types of nodes: - Leaf node only contains a value. - Extension node contains both a key and a value. - Branch node contains 2 or more children. - Hash node is a compressed node and only contains the actual node's hash. The actual node must be retrieved from the storage or over the network. As an example here is a trie containing 3 pairs: - 0x1201 -> val1 - 0x1203 -> val2 - 0x1224 -> val3 - 0x12 -> val4 ExtensionNode(0x0102), Next _______________________| | BranchNode [0, 1, 2, ...], Last -> Leaf(val4) | | | ExtensionNode [0x04], Next -> Leaf(val3) | BranchNode [0, 1, 2, 3, ...], Last -> HashNode(nil) | | | Leaf(val2) | Leaf(val1) There are 3 invariants that this implementation has: - Branch node cannot have <= 1 children - Extension node cannot have a zero-length key - Extension node cannot have another Extension node in its next field Thanks to these restrictions, there is a single root hash for every set of key-value pairs irregardless of the order they were added/removed in. The actual trie structure can vary because of node -> HashNode compressing. There is also one optimization which cost us almost nothing in terms of complexity but is quite beneficial: When we perform get/put/delete on a specific path, every Hash node which was retrieved from the storage is replaced by its uncompressed form, so that subsequent hits of this don't need to access the storage. */ package mpt