Module validators 

Delta encoding for Ethereum validator records.

This module operates directly on the canonical SSZ byte representation of validators rather than materializing Rust validator structs.

Working directly on SSZ bytes provides several advantages:

• avoids per-validator deserialization,
• performs only fixed-offset memory comparisons,
• minimizes allocations, and
• integrates naturally with consensus clients that already store validator registries as contiguous SSZ data.

Only mutable validator fields defined by the Ethereum consensus protocol are encoded. Immutable fields such as the validator public key are never included in generated patches.

Certain protocol-derived fields are reconstructed deterministically during application instead of being stored explicitly. For example, withdrawable_epoch for non-slashed validators is recomputed from exit_epoch according to the Ethereum consensus specification, reducing the size of the encoded delta without losing information.

Functions

apply_validators

Applies a validator delta to an SSZ validator registry in-place.

diff_validators

Computes a compact delta between two validator registry SSZ buffers.