Does anyone know why Socket and Address in phobos were created as
classes instead of structs?
My guess is that making Socket a class prevents socket handle
leaks because you can clean up the handle in the destructor when
the memory gets freed if no one closes it. Is this the reason it
is a class and are there any other reasons?
As for Address, I can't think of a reason why this one is a
class. It doesn't have to free any underlying OS resources, it's
just a chunk of memory that can be passed to and from the socket
API. Using sockaddr in C/C++ is more flexible because it allows
the application to decide where the memory lives (which will
almost always be on the stack). It feels like whoever made
Address a class probably wasn't familiar with sockaddr. Is that
the case or are there reasons why it was made a class?
If I was implementing sockaddr in D, I would have chosen to use
addressFamily as a sort of "makeshift Vptr", which is really how
it is used in C (even though C doesn't support classes). Using
this technique, I believe you could expose pretty much the same
API without the overhead of wrapping it inside a D object. Does
anyone know if this solution was considered?
- std.socket classes Jonathan Marler via Digitalmars-d-learn
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