* reorganize different variants of spartan and make direct snark more generic

* cargo fmt

* Improve performance of recursive

* Fix the test after rebase

* Fix CI/CD warnings

* Update benchmark to work with new interface of RecursiveSNARK

* Fix example to make sure step 1 is correct

* refactor: Removes unneeded pass-by value in verification

- Update function arguments to use borrowing instead of passing ownership

* Resolve the conflict with upstream branch

* refactor: Avoid extra input cloning in RecursiveSNARK::new

* Update criterion to 0.5.1 to prevent the panic with its plot

* Fix benchmark issue with new recursive_snark instance

* Fix CI/CD warning with

* refactor: Make mutation easier to observe

- Utilize mutable references to Points for better memory management

* chore: Downgrade clippy dependency for compatibility

---------

Co-authored-by: François Garillot <francois@garillot.net>

* a more optimal preprocessing SNARK

* update version

* cleanup; address clippy

* spark-based commitments to R1CS matrices

* small fixes

* checkpoint

* simplify further

* checkpoint

* gens --> ck

* update benches

* address clippy

* cleanup

* update version

make spartan generic over the evaluation engine

update version

disable Wasm CI check

* Clippy with Rust 1.67

* Clippy/Rustfmt with Rust 1.66.1

use a macro to remove redundant code

add a test case

* support for arbitrary arity for F

* revive MinRoot example

* revive tests

* revive ecdsa

* remove unused code

* use None instead of Some(1u32)

* revive benches

* fix clippy warning

* optimize MinRoot constraint system to not allocate unneeded advice variables

run with multiple MinRoot iterations per Nova step in a loop

* fix clippy warnings

* avoid creating commitments to zero vectors

* reduce the number of constraints in each iteration from 4 to 3

* rename methods for better clarity

* rename

* Bump version

use a default implementation for step circuit

* support multiple iterations of MinRoot per Nova step

* small edits to println

* fix declaration

* add the MinRoot VDF example

* optimize a bit

* optimization and cleanup

* clippy

* add examples to CI

* use inbuilt pow_vartime