ethereumjs-util 2.4.0

v2.4.0 - Parallel Hardfork and Experimental Constantinople Support

on Node.js Yarn

With the 2.4.x release series we now start to gradually add Constantinople features with the
bitwise shifting instructions from EIP 145
making the start being introduced in the v2.4.0 release.

Since both the scope of the Constantinople hardfork as well as the state of at least some of the EIPs
to be included are not yet finalized, this is only meant for EXPERIMENTAL purposes, e.g. for developer
tools to give users early access and make themself familiar with dedicated features.

Once scope and EIPs from Constantinople are final we will target a v2.5.0 release which will officially
introduce Constantinople support with all the changes bundled together.

Note that from this release on we also introduce new chain (default: mainnet) and hardfork
(default: byzantium) initialization parameters, which make use of our new ethereumjs-common library and in the future will allow
for parallel hardfork support from Byzantium onwards.

Since hardfork default might be changed or dropped in future releases, you might want to explicitly
set this to byzantium on your next update to avoid future unexpected behavior.

All the changes from this release:

FEATURES/FUNCTIONALITY

• Improved chain and fork support, see PR #304
• Support for the Constantinople bitwise shifiting instructions SHL, SHR and SAR, see PR #251
• New newContract event which can be used to do interrupting tasks on contract/address creation, see PR #306
• Alignment of behavior of bloom filter hashing to go along with mainnet compatible clients BREAKING, see PR #295

UPDATES/TESTING

• Usage of the latest rustbn.js API, see PR #312
• Some cleanup in precompile error handling, see PR #318
• Some cleanup for StateManager, see PR #266
• Renaming of util.sha3 usages to util.keccak256 and bump ethereumjs-util to v5.2.0 (you should do to if you use ethereumjs-util)
• Parallel testing of theByzantium and Constantinople state tests, see PR #317
• For lower build times our CI configuration now runs solely on CircleCI and support for Travis have been dropped, see PR #316

BUG FIXES

• Programmatic runtime errors in the VM execution context (within an opcode) are no longer absorbed and displayed as a VMError but explicitly thrown, allowing for easier discovery of implementation bugs, see PR #307
• Fix of the Bloom.check() method not working properly, see PR #311
• Fix a bug when REVERT is used within a CREATE context, see PR #297
• Fix a bug in FakeBlockChain error handing, see PR #320