search

koinos / koinos-types

The Rosetta Stone of the Koinos ecosystem. Allows for the interpretation of Koinos data structures in a multitude of languages. Useful in the development of microservices, clients, and smart contracts.
MIT License
12 stars 3 forks source link

VariableBlob should be string instead of byte slice in Golang target #142

Closed theoreticalbts closed 3 years ago

theoreticalbts commented 3 years ago

It is useful to be able to use types reflected by koinos-types as map keys in Golang.

Map keys must be types that are comparable, where "comparable" is defined by a specific part of the Golang language spec [1]. Unfortunately, "Slice...values are not comparable" [1]. Which means []byte cannot be used as a map key, nor can any type containing []byte. Since VariableBlob is currently an alias of []byte, this includes much of our type hierarchy.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution. Strings can be used as map keys [1]. The string type, in fact, "holds arbitrary bytes. It is not required to hold Unicode text, UTF-8 text, or any other predefined format. As far as the content of a string is concerned, it is exactly equivalent to a slice of bytes." [2]

So we should change the type alias for VariableBlob from []byte to string in order to solve this problem.

[1] https://golang.org/ref/spec#Comparison_operators

[2] https://blog.golang.org/strings