ANN: network-alt 0.3 and hsgnutls 0.2.1

[Einar Karttunen]

On 05.11 18:29, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
> It's quite low-level, isn't it? I wonder if it would be worth doing 
> something along these lines:
> 
> newtype IPv4Address = IPv4Address Word32
> newtype IPv6Address = IPv6Address Word128

This brings the question on whether they would be native or
big endian - and the user would still need to use resolver
API to get at these. Also the resolver API might return
addresses in different address families so we would need:

data Either3 a b c = First a | Second b | Third c

getAddrInfo :: HostName -> PortName -> Flags -> IO [Either3 IPv4Address IPv6Address OtherAddress]
while it is currently
getAddrInfo :: HostName -> PortName -> Flags -> IO [(SocketType, SocketAddress)]
which means applications can use addresses in different
families in an uniform way.

> type PortNumber = Word16
> 
> data InternetService addr  = MkInternetService {
>     localAddress :: addr,
>     sendUDP :: UDPOptions -> addr -> PortNumber -> [Word8] -> IO (),
>     -- etc.
> }
>
> getIPv4Services :: IO [InternetService IPv4Address]
> getIPv6Services :: IO [InternetService IPv6Address]

Does it make sense to have the address type in there?
Most of the time high level applications should not
care whether the socket is IPv4 or IPv6 (or something
entirely else). One of my main goals has been to
make the protocols transparent - changing from IPv4
to being protocol agnostic should be as easy as possible.

The API you are suggesting would be certainly quite
easy to implement on top of the current one. If you
can specify the interface you would like I think
I can include something like that in the next release...

Currently the code would look like:

sendTCPTo hostname port data = do
  s <- connectTCP hostname port
  sendString s data

sendUDPTo hostname addressType port data = do
  let st = SocketType addressType sockDgram 0
  s <- socket st
  ((cst,csa):_) <- getAddrInfo hostname port 0 st
  connect s csa
  sendString s data

sendUDPv4 host port data = sendUDPTo host afInet port data
sendUDPv6 host port data = sendUDPTo host afInet6 port data
sendUDPAny host port data= sendUDPTo host afUnspec port data

Adding a function like connectTCP for UDP would be very easy, but
in practise most of the UDP code I have worked with was interested
in the low level details.

- Einar Karttunen