pure-sockets: Pure Sockets Interface — Pure Language and Library Documentation

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# pure-sockets: Pure Sockets Interface

Version 0.7, October 22, 2014

Albert Gräf <aggraef@gmail.com>

This is an interface to the Berkeley socket functions. It provides most of the core functionality, so you can create sockets for both stream and datagram based protocols and use these to transmit messages. Unix-style file sockets are also available if the host system supports them.

## Installation

Get the latest source from https://bitbucket.org/purelang/pure-lang/downloads/pure-sockets-0.7.tar.gz.

Run `make` to compile the module and `sudo make install` to install it in the Pure library directory. To uninstall the module, use `sudo make uninstall`. There are a number of other targets (mostly for maintainers), please see the Makefile for details.

`make` tries to guess your Pure installation directory and platform-specific setup. If it gets this wrong, you can set some variables manually. In particular, `make install prefix=/usr` sets the installation prefix, and `make PIC=-fPIC` or some similar flag might be needed for compilation on 64 bit systems. You can also set custom compilation options with the CFLAGS variable, e.g.: `make CFLAGS=-O3`. Again, please see the Makefile for details.

## Usage

To use the operations of this module, put the following in your Pure script:

    using sockets;

With the `sockets` module loaded, all the standard socket functions are available and work pretty much like in C. The only real difference is that, for convenience, functions taking socket addresses as parameters (`struct_sockaddr*` pointers in Pure), are called without the `addrlen` parameter; the size of the socket address structure will be inferred automatically and passed to the underlying C functions. Also, there are some convenience functions which act as wrappers around `getaddrinfo` and `getnameinfo` to create socket addresses from symbolic information (hostname or ip, port names or numbers) and return information about existing address pointers, see Creating and Inspecting Socket Addresses below.

Below is a list of the provided functions. Please see the corresponding manual pages for details, and check the Pure scripts in the examples subdirectory for some examples.

### Creating and Inspecting Socket Addresses

These functions are Pure-specific. The created socket addresses are malloc’ed and free themselves automatically when garbage-collected.

`sockaddr` ()

  Create a pointer to an empty socket address suitable to hold the socket address result of routines like `accept`, `getsockname`, `recvfrom`, etc. which return a socket address.

`sockaddr` ([int family,] char *path)

  Create a local (a.k.a. file) socket address for the given pathname. The `family` parameter, if specified, must be `AF_UNIX` here. Please note that `AF_UNIX` is not supported on all platforms. You can check for this by testing the `HAVE_AF_UNIX` constant, which is a truth value specifying whether `AF_UNIX` is available on your system.

`sockaddr` ([int family,] char *host, char *port)
`sockaddr` ([int family,] char *host, int port)

  This uses `getaddrinfo` to retrieve an `AF_INET` or `AF_INET6` address for the given hostname (or numeric IP address in string form) and port (specified either as an int or a string). If `family` is omitted, it defaults to `AF_UNSPEC` which matches both `AF_INET` and `AF_INET6` addresses.

`sockaddrs` ([int family,] char *host, char *port)
`sockaddrs` ([int family,] char *host, int port)

  This works like `sockaddr` above, but returns a list with all matching addresses.

`sockaddr_family` addr

  Returns the address family of the given address.

`sockaddr_path` addr

  Returns the pathname for `AF_UNIX` addresses.

`sockaddr_hostname` addr

  Returns the hostname if available, the IP address otherwise.

`sockaddr_ip` addr

  Returns the IP address.

`sockaddr_service` addr

  Returns the service (a.k.a. port) name.

`sockaddr_port` addr

  Returns the port number.

`sockaddr_info` addr

  Returns a readable description of a socket address, as a `(family,hostname,port)` tuple. You should be able to pass this into `sockaddr` again to get the original address.

### Creating and Closing Sockets

`socket` domain type protocol

  Creates a socket for the given protocol family (`AF_UNIX`, `AF_INET` or `AF_INET6`), socket type (`SOCK_STREAM`, `SOCK_DGRAM`, etc.) and protocol. Note that on Linux we also support the `SOCK_NONBLOCK` (non-blocking) and `SOCK_CLOEXEC` (close-on-exec) flags which can be or’ed with the socket type to get sockets with the corresponding features. The protocol number is usually 0, denoting the default protocol, but it can also be any of the prescribed `IPPROTO` constants (a few common ones are predefined by this module, try `show -g IPPROTO_*` for a list of those).

`socketpair` domain type protocol sv

  Create a pair of sockets. The descriptors are returned in the integer vector `sv` passed in the last argument.

`shutdown` fd how

  Perform shutdown on a socket. The second argument should be one of `SHUT_RD`, `SHUT_WR` and `SHUT_RDWR`.

`closesocket` fd

  This is provided for Windows compatibility. On POSIX systems this is just `close`.

### Establishing Connections

`accept` sockfd addr

`bind` sockfd addr

`connect` sockfd addr

`listen` sockfd backlog

### Socket I/O

`recv` fd buf len flags

`send` fd buf len flags

`recvfrom` fd buf len flags addr

`sendto` fd buf len flags addr

The usual `send`/`recv` flags specified by POSIX (`MSG_EOR`, `MSG_OOB`, `MSG_PEEK`, `MSG_WAITALL`) are provided. On Linux we also support `MSG_DONTWAIT`. Note that on POSIX systems you can also just `fdopen` the socket descriptor and use the standard file I/O operations from the `system` module instead.

### Socket Information

`getsockname` fd addr

`getpeername` fd addr

`getsockopt` fd level name val len

`setsockopt` fd level name val len

For `getsockopt` and `setsockopt`, currently only the `SOL_SOCKET` level is defined (`level` argument) along with the available POSIX socket options (`name` argument). Try `show -g SO_*` to get a list of those. Also note that for most socket level options the `val` argument is actually an `int*`, so you can pass a Pure int vector (with `len = SIZEOF_INT`) for that parameter.

## Example

Here is a fairly minimal example using Unix stream sockets. To keep things simple, this does no error checking whatsoever and just keeps sending strings back and forth. More elaborate examples can be found in the examples directory in the sources.

    using sockets, system;

    const path = "server_socket";
    extern int unlink(char *name);

    server = loop with
      loop = loop if ~null s && ~response fp s when
        // Connect to a client.
        cfd = accept fd $ sockaddr ();
        // Open the client socket as a FILE* and read a request.
        fp = fdopen cfd "r+"; s = fgets fp;
      end;
      loop = puts "server is exiting" $$ closesocket fd $$
             unlink path $$ () otherwise;
      response fp s::string = s=="quit\n" when
        // Process the request. (Here we just print the received
        // message and echo it back to the client.)
        printf "server> %s" s;
        fputs s fp;
      end;
    end when
      // Create the server socket and start listening.
      unlink path;
      fd = socket AF_UNIX SOCK_STREAM 0;
      bind fd (sockaddr path); listen fd 5;
      printf "server listening at '%s'\n" path;
    end;

    client = loop with
      // Keep reading requests from stdin.
      loop = loop if ~null s && ~request s when
        fputs "client> " stdout; s = fgets stdin;
      end;
      loop = puts "client is exiting" $$ () otherwise;
      request s::string = s=="quit\n" when
        fd = socket AF_UNIX SOCK_STREAM 0;
        connect fd (sockaddr path);
        // Send the request to the server.
        fp = fdopen fd "r+"; fputs s fp;
        // Get the reply.
        s = fgets fp;
      end;
    end;

To use this example, run the `server` function in one instance of the Pure interpreter and the `client` function in another. Enter a line when the client prompts you for input; it will be printed by the server. Behind the scenes, the server also sends the line back to the client. After receiving the reply, the client prompts for the next input line. Entering end-of-file at the client prompt terminates the client but keeps the server running, so that you can start another client and reconnect to the server. Entering just `quit` in the client terminates both server and client. Here is how a typical interaction may look like:

    > client;
    client> 1+1
    client> foo bar
    client> quit
    client is exiting
    ()

    > server;
    server listening at 'server_socket'
    server> 1+1
    server> foo bar
    server> quit
    server is exiting
    ()

Note that while the server processes requests sequentially, it accepts connections from a new client after each request, so that you can run as many clients as you like.

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