RAII implementation for Socket and Selector

[Jose Armando Garcia]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 5:13 PM, jdrewsen <jdrewsen at nospam.com> wrote:
> Den 20-06-2011 22:38, Jose Armando Garcia skrev:
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> For the past few of days I have been working on a RAII implementation
>> for Socket and Selector. Sockets are a ref counted wrapper around the
>> socket handle which closes the handle once the ref count goes to zero.
>> It provides safe methods for bind, connect, listen, accept, recv, send
>> and close. The module also provides helper methods for creating
>> sockets for a tcp server, tcp client, udp server and udp client. The
>> helper method used the Address struct which is basically wrapper
>> around getaddrinfo. As of right now the module provides support for
>> ipv4 and ipv6.
>>
>> On top of Socket we have Selector which can be used to safely wait on
>> more than one socket. To register on a selector call the register
>> method in Socket. Use Socket.unregister to unregister the socket.
>> Sockets are automatically unregistered when closed. The current
>> implementation for selector only support epoll (sorry Windows and BSD
>> users) but I am highly confident that it can be ported to other
>> platforms. I plan to it at a future date but there are currently some
>> serious issues with DMD and druntime that invalidate the strong/weak
>> ref counting design.
>>
>> It works well enough to pass the unittests but I had to do a lot of
>> hacks which I hope I can remove once DMD and druntime are fixed.
>>
>> I should also mention that the design was influenced by Java's NIO and
>> Ruby's socket implementation.
>>
>> Here is the code:
>> https://github.com/jsancio/phobos/blob/socket/std/net/socket.d. It
>> doesn't have any documentation right now.
>>
>> I wont be able to work on it for the next couple of weeks but comments
>> are welcome.
>>
>> Thanks!
>> -Jose
>
> Isn't there a lot of overlap with std.socket? Could it be based on
> std.socket instead? Maybe by extending std.socket itself with the any
> missing features.
>
> /Jonas
>

Yes, it is possible to fix some of the issues with std.socket without
deprecating the API but you can't make it RAII without deprecation.
Reference counting is the main point of my change. Actually, I don't
currently have an intention to propose this as a replacement for
std.socket. My current intention is to build an event driven framework
for D similar to Twisted in Python. In the process we can move some of
the basic functionality to Phobos.