These are technically static libs, but not in any way shared libs.
They are used solely only by this repo and really only by the hub.
Most important, no header files are installed and basically none of
the normal rules for reusable libraries are applied to these files.
Flowee experimented with a 'metablock' a piece of data stored next to
the blocks with some metadata it discovered during validation.
One of those pieces of info is the txid, which turned out to be too big
to store here (16GB or so added).
This change removes the txid but it does keep the script-flags and the
fees for each transaction (8 bytes per tx) which adds maybe 3GB to the
entire chain.
We moved wallet and most other functionality to flowee-pay, this
component has actually never been shipped / packaged and any
server-GUI will likely look very different than this.
This makes the server bind only to yggdrasil (a mesh networking
solution) addresses which have as specific advantage that it does
protocol-level encryption.
What we did previously is load a static chain which was to avoid lots of
work by simply memory-mapping the data instead of inserting it in a
vector.
This improves upon that by also having a metadata file which holds the
block-hashes directly readable. This avoids us having to iterate over
the blockheaders and hashing them.
Additionally we now have a single chain-work field that is the total
amount added work for the headers. This saves us from doing 256-bit
divisions and work for each blockheader as well.
Result is that we make the statup mostly about memory moving and remove
all CPU intensive stuff. Going from 1450ms to 400ms on desktop.
I expect an even greater gain on mobile CPUs.
This avoids a naming conflict with a p2p class BlockHeader.
Notice that the block data structures are mostly still private API, they
are in the utils dir but headers are not installed, nobody has needed
them so far.
tomFlowee