Nov 22, 2025

I took a look at this last night. This can also be implemented for full validation by just moving block.check() to the block validator (vs downloader). At that point the downloader is the same as for milestone, which is sufficient given that validation will perform the checks. That would materially reduce validation cost. As significantly more memory would be available for validation, and CPU and alloc/free costs for download would drop to near zero.

This requires a new block and tx parser to pull the necessary database fields from the wire stream, and to write them to the store. We use a “skip parser” to pull out both witness and non-witness hashes from the wire stream. This uses a fast stream that allows forward and reverse movement with the stream. This same technique can be used to avoid any allocations at all when moving a block/txs from the wire buffer to the store. We can literally just make a store::writer that operates over a store::stream and writes directly to tables, and a block::writer that operates over the incoming wire fast stream, and then just have the the writer write the reader. The writer flush just closes out the two phase commit.

So we just drive scripts and witnesses directly into the store with nothing but length parse. The rest is just bookkeeping trivia.