I was looking at the ReentrancyGuard implementation, specifically at this part:
// The values being non-zero value makes deployment a bit more expensive,
// but in exchange the refund on every call to nonReentrant will be lower in
// amount. Since refunds are capped to a percentage of the total
// transaction's gas, it is best to keep them low in cases like this one, to
// increase the likelihood of the full refund coming into effect.
uint256 private constant NOT_ENTERED = 1;
uint256 private constant ENTERED = 2;
I've read the comments a couple of times but I don't quite understand the purpose. Why would you not want to save as much gas as possible for the user? In other words, why would the user care if the refund comes from ReentrancyGuard or from some other source?
If we used 0/1 values, setting the _status variable from 0 to 1 would cost 20k gas, and resetting it to 0 at the end of the transaction will cost 100 gas with a 19.9k refund. If the full refund is realized this would amount to only 200 gas. However, refunds are capped at 1/5th of total transaction cost (EIP-3529), so a transaction that uses this version of ReentrancyGuard has to cost around 100k gas in order to actually realize the optimal cost, and this is assuming there are no other refunds in that transaction. Note that if the transaction costs less than 100k gas, the full refund is not realized and the cost of using the reentrancy guard may be closer to 20k gas than to 200.
For a general purpose utility like ReentrancyGuard, we can't assume that a transaction costs more than 100k gas. If instead we use 1/2 values, setting the flag costs 2.9k gas, resetting it costs 100 gas with 2.8k refund. The final amount if the full refund is realized is still 200 gas, but the refund is a lot smaller now so the total transaction cost doesn't need to be as high to realize it.
(This is obviously an EVM inefficiency, but it will be fixed with transient stoage!)
This forum is about OpenZeppelin code, not about the Solidity language
The figures quoted in the answer above, occasionally change as a result of EVM version update, which the Solidity language is agnostic to
With regards to "paying less gas and getting back less refund", I'd like to point out an additional benefit, which seems to have been left out in the answer above.
Suppose the following two cases:
Pay 109K gas, get back 9K gas
Pay 104K gas, get back 4K gas
In both cases, you end up paying the ETH worth of 100K gas.
However, in case 1 you need to provide the ETH worth of 109K gas, while in case 2 you need to provide the ETH worth of 104K gas.
So in order to execute case 1, you need to hold more ETH in your walle tthan what you need in order to execute case 2.
Moreover, since miners opt for "highest gas price / lowest gas limit" first, the expected execution time for case 1 is longer than that of case 2.