Rework codecs & extrinsics for poc-3 compatibility

[jacogr]

I cannot put it more succinctly :)

• Remote extrinsics & storage (the latter will still contain some, e.g. :code, basically all these Extract well known keys into a single place paritytech/substrate#764)
• Pull storage, extrinsics and events (this is new) from state_getMeta
• Fixup encoders and do it properly - currently they are all-over, some in primitives, some in params
• Make everything work....
• ... I missed some stuff

cc @amaurymartiny :)

[amaury1093]

Yeah, I'll work on this.

[jacogr]

This could be useful - #149

No need to use anything in there, but it is probably worth a look - it makes some attempt for saner Json/u8a encoding/decoding.

Either way, the work here will replace the above, so it will never be merged as-is, nor make much progress form where it is. Feel free to adapt, copy or completely ignore as a science experiment.

[jacogr]

New extrinsics format for poc-3 - https://github.com/paritytech/wiki/blob/master/Extrinsic.md

The basics are the same, version header added, order somewhat changed. More importantly, it is now documented.

[jacogr]

From Gav -

"
i'm changing codec to include a compact integer encoding
since trie nodes are currently way too inefficient with the u32 len encoding
here's the spec:

// compact encoding:
// 0b00 00 00 00 / 00 00 00 00 / 00 00 00 00 / 00 00 00 00

// (0 ... 2**6 - 1)		(u8)
//   00 xx xx xx		

// (2**6 ... 2**14 - 1)	(u8, u16)													
//   01 yy yy yy / yy yy yy yy					

// (2**14 ... 2**30 - 1)	(u16, u32)							
//   10 zz zz zz / zz zz zz zz / zz zz zz zz / zz zz zz zz			

// (2**30 ... 2**536 - 1)	(u32, u64, u128, U256, U512, U520)		
//   11 nn nn nn [ / zz zz zz zz ]{4 + n}									

"

[jacogr]

UInt encoding paritytech/substrate#847

[amaury1093]

Putting here to have a written record of what's been discussed on Riot. It must be done in the following order.

• 1. Add a static decode method on all types, which takes any input of any type, and decodes it correctly to the type's base type (i.e. for Text, decode() returns a string).
• 2. Remove fromJSON and fromU8a from all types, create them only with constructor.
  • The constructor will just be: super(MyType.decode(value));
• 3. Remove Base class, let all types extend directly JS types (e.g. Moment extends Date, Text extends String...)
• 4. Replace Base with a Codec interface, which all types need to implement, which basically is

interface Codec {
  static decode(input: any): any;
  encodedLength: number;
  toHex(): string;
  toJSON(): any;
  toString(): string;
  toU8a(): Uint8Array;
}

[jacogr]

Add toString() - this is quite useful in display (UI only uses this - although I suppose it doesn't need to be on the interface since it is part of base "Object")

[ltfschoen]

@amaurymartiny what branch will you be using to work on it?

[amaury1093]

@ltfschoen It's not a one branch effort, Jaco and I have been creating small PRs all the way to slowly refactor all stuff, see all the linked PRs above.

All PRs that are related to this refactoring have a "Related #161" message.

[jacogr]

Closing. Feature-complete.

[polkadot-js-bot]

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