[Python-3000] socket GC worries

[Guido van Rossum]

2007/10/29, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz>:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
> > That's because I don't find the synonyms a good idea.
>
> Even if it means that stream sockets then have the
> same interface as all other stream-like objects in
> the I/O system, so buffering layers can be used on
> them, etc.? That seems like a rather good reason to
> me.
>
> If you want to be pedantic about not having synonyms,
> then fix send() and recv() so that they only work
> on *non*-stream sockets, or have different classes
> for stream and non-stream sockets.
>
> In other words, to my mind, for stream sockets it's
> send and recv that are synonyms for read and write,
> not the other way around.
>
> > On Windows you can't dup() a fd.
>
> Oh, blarg. Forget that part, then.
>
> But I still think it shouldn't be necessary to share
> fds between different objects in the first place.
>
> This is the problem that would be solved by making
> sockets have an interface that is directly usable by
> higher layers of the I/O system. There would be no
> need to reach down below the socket object and grab
> its fd, so the socket would have complete ownership
> of it, and it would get closed when the socket
> object eventually went away. This would happen at
> the C level, so cycles and __del__ methods wouldn't
> be a serious problem.

Having the SocketIO wrapper works just as well. I agree we need some
refactoring to deal with the ownership issue better, but having read()
and write() methods on the _socket object is not the solution.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)