This implements an efficient and zero-allocation script tokenizer that
is exported to both provide a new capability to tokenize scripts to
external consumers of the API as well as to serve as a base for
refactoring the existing highly inefficient internal code.
It is important to note that this tokenizer is intended to be used in
consensus critical code in the future, so it must exactly follow the
existing semantics.
The current script parsing mechanism used throughout the txscript module
is to fully tokenize the scripts into an array of internal parsed
opcodes which are then examined and passed around in order to implement
virtually everything related to scripts.
While that approach does simplify the analysis of certain scripts and
thus provide some nice properties in that regard, it is both extremely
inefficient in many cases, and makes it impossible for external
consumers of the API to implement any form of custom script analysis
without manually implementing a bunch of error prone tokenizing code or,
alternatively, the script engine exposing internal structures.
For example, as shown by profiling the total memory allocations of an
initial sync, the existing script parsing code allocates a total of
around 295.12GB, which equates to around 50% of all allocations
performed. The zero-alloc tokenizer this introduces will allow that to
be reduced to virtually zero.
The following is a before and after comparison of tokenizing a large
script with a high opcode count using the existing code versus the
tokenizer this introduces for both speed and memory allocations:
benchmark old ns/op new ns/op delta
BenchmarkScriptParsing-8 63464 677 -98.93%
benchmark old allocs new allocs delta
BenchmarkScriptParsing-8 1 0 -100.00%
benchmark old bytes new bytes delta
BenchmarkScriptParsing-8 311299 0 -100.00%
The following is an overview of the changes:
- Introduce new error code ErrUnsupportedScriptVersion
- Implement zero-allocation script tokenizer
- Add a full suite of tests to ensure the tokenizer works as intended
and follows the required consensus semantics
- Add an example of using the new tokenizer to count the number of
opcodes in a script
- Update README.md to include the new example
- Update script parsing benchmark to use the new tokenizer
This cleans up the code for handling the checksig and checkmultisig
opcode strict signatures to explicitly call out any semantics that are
likely not obvious and improve readability.
It also introduce new distinct errors for each condition which can
result in a signature being rejected due to not following the strict
encoding requirements and updates reference test adaptor accordingly.
ScriptVerifyNullFail defines that signatures must be empty if a
CHECKSIG or CHECKMULTISIG operation fails.
This commit also enables ScriptVerifyNullFail at the mempool policy
level.
This converts the majority of script errors from generic errors created
via errors.New and fmt.Errorf to use a concrete type that implements the
error interface with an error code and description.
This allows callers to programmatically detect the type of error via
type assertions and an error code while still allowing the errors to
provide more context.
For example, instead of just having an error the reads "disabled opcode"
as would happen prior to these changes when a disabled opcode is
encountered, the error will now read "attempt to execute disabled opcode
OP_FOO".
While it was previously possible to programmatically detect many errors
due to them being exported, they provided no additional context and
there were also various instances that were just returning errors
created on the spot which callers could not reliably detect without
resorting to looking at the actual error message, which is nearly always
bad practice.
Also, while here, export the MaxStackSize and MaxScriptSize constants
since they can be useful for consumers of the package and perform some
minor cleanup of some of the tests.
