alt Hacker NewsYeah, I’ve always felt that the stream API is a leaky abstraction for providing access to networking. I understand the attraction of making network I/O look like local file access given the philosophy of UNIX.
The API should have been message oriented from the start. This would avoid having the network stack try to compensate for the behavior of the application layer. Then Nagel’s or something like it would just be a library available for applications that might need it.
The stream API is as annoying on the receiving end especially when wrapping (like TLS) is involved. Basically you have to code your layers as if the underlying network is handing you a byte at a time - and the application has to try to figure out where the message boundaries are - adding a great deal of complexity.
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> message oriented
Very well said. I think there is enormous complexity in many layers because we don't have that building block easily available.
the whole point of TCP is that it is a stream of bytes, not of messages.
The problem is that this is not in practice quite what most applications need, but the Internet evolved towards UDP and TCP only.
So you can have message-based if you want, but then you have to do sequencing, gap filling or flow control yourself, or you can have the overkill reliable byte stream with limited control or visibility at the application level.