This commit modifies the writeElement function to have a "fast path" which uses type
assertions for all of the types which btcwire write so the more expensive
reflection-based binary.Write can be avoided.
Also, this changes all cases that were writing raw ShaHash (32-byte) arrays (which
requires a stack copy) instead simply passing the pointer.
The following benchmark results show the results for serializing a block header
after these changes:
Before: BenchmarkWriteBlockHeader 500000 5566 ns/op
After: BenchmarkWriteBlockHeader 1000000 991 ns/op
This is part of the ongoing effort to optimize serialization as noted in
conformal/btcd#27.
Several of the messages store the parts that have a variable number of
elements as slices. This commit modifies the code to choose sane defaults
for the backing arrays for the slices so when the entries are actually
appended, a lot of the overhead of growing the backing arrays and copying
the data multiple times is avoided.
Along the same lines, when decoding messages, the actual size is known and
now is pre-allocated instead of dynamically growing the backing array
thereby avoiding some overhead.
