[usocket-devel] TIMEOUT support on SBCL

[Hans Hübner]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 09:30, Leslie P. Polzer<sky at viridian-project.de> wrote:
>
> I've noticed that SBCL's SB-BSD-SOCKETS:MAKE-STREAM
> supports specifying a timeout but usocket declares
> it as unsupported.
>
> Is this simply something that needs to be changed
> or are there larger issue which I'm not aware of?

Last time I looked, SBCL did not support timeouts on the stream level,
i.e. the TIMEOUT argument to MAKE-STREAM only affected the underlying
socket (and, specifically, the SO_TIMEOUT socket option value).  This
means that the value passed as TIMEOUT is imprecisesely followed, at
best, and could be excessively exceeded in pathological cases.

There is kind of a semantic gap between what TIMEOUT implies and what
MAKE-STREAM really does.  If you want to work on this, I'd propose
that you added a new SOCKET-TIMEOUT argument that would be passed as
the value of the SO_TIMEOUT value to make it clear that the timeout
passed only indirectly affects the stream's behavior.

-Hans