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 can't be really solved in many cases (it's used in P2P protocol and we have
to follow the usual conventions there) and in most of the cases we don't care
about the difference between nil slice and zero-length slice.
Which speeds it up at least twofold for a typical 32-bytes write (and that's
for a very naïve test that allocates new BufBinWriter on every iteration):
pkg: github.com/CityOfZion/neo-go/pkg/io
BenchmarkWriteBytes-8 10000000 124 ns/op
BenchmarkWriteBytesOld-8 5000000 251 ns/op
The logic here is that we'll have all binary encoding/decoding done via our io
package, which simplifies error handling. This functionality doesn't belong to
util, so it's moved.
This also expands BufBinWriter with Reset() method to fit the needs of core
package.
