This is a production release of go-codec.

First, it resolves the go.mod impasse where we had different import paths (github.com/ugorji/go and github.com/ugorji/go/codec) causing the ambiguous import error.

This is now fixed by leveraging import cycles to ensure that either one works well and resolves to the same bits.

The other benefits are a clean up and refactoring of the codebase:

• provide better and more consistent performance
• streamline the use of sync.Pool vs free lists
• Use more optimized helpers when not in safe mode
• Smoothen rough edges across the board
• and many more ...

The main goal has always been to provide the most feature-rich and performant package for encoding and decoding of multiple popular binary and text formats in a consistent way.

We believe we have achieved that!