Support Unix Sockets in dart:io #21403

schultzter · 2014-10-23T21:38:36Z

What steps will clearly show the issue / need for enhancement?

a lot of Unix based systems use Unix sockets for interprocess communication
with dart:io only TCP based communication is possible
support for Unix sockets would greatly increase the integration potential of dart server-side apps

What is the current output?
None, not supported

What would you like to see instead?
Success, connected!

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
1.7.2 on Arch Linux

Please provide any additional information below.

lrhn · 2014-10-24T07:35:10Z

Added Library-IO, Area-Library, Triaged labels.

DartBot · 2014-11-14T22:09:10Z

This comment was originally written by @PaulAnnekov

It's very important feature. Unix sockets are lighter than TCP/IP Sockets. They will be useful for nginx + dart setup where you need to proxy requests from nginx to dart server that listens for requests.

DartBot · 2015-04-20T03:56:18Z

This comment was originally written by @kaendfinger

This is a great idea, but I'm pretty sure you can use the Unix "Everything is a file" principle to make it work for now.

sgjesse · 2015-04-20T08:03:19Z

In the dart:io model there is currently no way of creating/listing/deleting a Unix Domain socket, and the also listening is only supported for TCP/IP or UDP.

DartBot · 2015-04-20T08:04:16Z

This comment was originally written by @PaulAnnekov

It's not the right way. I think it's not a big deal for dart developers to add ability to set AF_UNIX socket family in the same way as AF_INET is set. Plus add support for family address as file name. The only problem is backward compatibility with current Dart Socket API.
read() and write() functions are not aliases for recv() and send(). You will have to write a lot of code to repeat all their features using plain I/O functions. "Everything is a file" principle will lead to the wheel reinvention.

zoechi · 2015-12-11T11:09:35Z

Any progress on this? I think to remember that I saw a commit or code review where this was mentioned not too long ago, but I might mix up something. I'd like to use this to connect to docker services. It's possible to configure Docker to accept http connections but that results in severe security issues.

sgjesse · 2015-12-11T11:26:23Z

We have been experimenting with adding support for UNIX domain sockets, and is currently using a patched Dart VM for some experimentation. However I don't expect this to be added after all, as we will try to move the experimental use we have back to TCP sockets.

For reference the experimental patch is here: https://codereview.chromium.org/1293533002/.

zoechi · 2015-12-11T11:44:52Z

@sgjesse Thanks a lot for this quick response!
Doesn't seem to add a lot of complexity.
What are the reasons for this changes being dropped?

sgjesse · 2015-12-11T12:13:26Z

The change is not complete - it is missing changes to the File class where
we currently also don't handle domain sockets (the patch have a hack to
allow one to delete this type of files).

Another concern is to add platform specific APIs dart:io. If this should be
abstracted to also have a Windows counterpart we would have to find a
matching IPC concept on Windows, which would increase the complexity quite
a bit.

On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Günter Zöchbauer <notifications@github.com

wrote:

@sgjesse https://github.com/sgjesse Thanks a lot for this quick
response!
Doesn't seem to add a lot of complexity.
What are the reasons for this changes being dropped?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#21403 (comment).

zoechi · 2015-12-11T13:08:49Z

I understand that reasoning, but it's sad to limit Darts usage on Unix systems this way because Windows doesn't provide anything similar :(

Pajn · 2016-08-05T10:37:03Z

Is there any development in this area?

There are many cross-platform languages that support Unix Sockets on platforms that have support for it and does not provide an alternative on Windows. The alternative already exist in the form of TCP and UDP, it's just a much worse alternative for certain use-cases.

Redis with Unix sockets can support around 50% more throughput than with TCP sockets, it's sad to have to think of that and have that as a thing to consider when choosing a server platform.

bergwerf · 2017-07-31T04:17:29Z

I want to attempt to write a very simple X11 client in Dart. Is Unix sockets really off the table? That would be quite sad in my opinion.

zoechi · 2017-07-31T07:56:17Z

Another concern is to add platform specific APIs dart:io. If this should be
abstracted to also have a Windows counterpart we would have to find a
matching IPC concept on Windows, which would increase the complexity quite
a bit.

This missing feature prevents several use cases which don't apply to Windows, because they are not used much on Windows but are a significant limitation on Unix systems.

bergwerf · 2017-07-31T12:24:42Z

Perhaps there can be a dart:unix library for unix specific APIs?

Hixie · 2017-10-08T06:03:49Z

FWIW, this is the workaround I used (to send the string status\n to a Unix domain socket named /tmp/control.socket):

await Process.run('/bin/sh', <String>['-c', 'echo status | nc -U /tmp/control.socket']);

knopp · 2018-03-03T18:00:21Z

Why not use named pipes as counterpart on Windows? While not being completely same thing, for example libuv has single pipe stream abstraction that works for both domain socket and named pipes. It is extremely useful for IPC.

recoilme · 2019-04-18T16:37:24Z

Is there any development in this area?

roman-vanesyan · 2019-06-11T20:19:03Z

Other programming languages supports Unix sockets, despite the fact that support is only limited to Unix systems. For example, Rust marks API as "supported only on Unix". https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/os/unix/net/struct.UnixStream.html

Node.js also supports Unix sockets as well as Go.

Maybe the functionality can be exposed in specific module like dart:unix or dart:uds

knopp · 2019-06-11T20:21:58Z

NodeJS uses named pipes on windows (through libuv). We have a project using libuv on IPC (domain sockets on unix, named pipes on windows) and it works very well. I don't quite see why this couldn't be done for dart.

ailabs-software · 2019-06-23T23:00:13Z

Please fix this, this is the most annoying issue I have with Dart. I want to use Dart for IPC without management of clumsy ports.

rahul-dutt-sharma · 2019-06-28T03:54:05Z

Just dropped my plan to use Flutter for my dream project cause of this

ghost · 2019-07-03T09:30:03Z

We need that generally in future. For me not highest priority, but one of them, to Dart the world 👍

radzish · 2019-10-20T19:05:03Z

I believe that without this it is not possible to write serverless Cloud Run service connecting to Google CloudSQL directly: https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/connect-run, as last one requires connecting to DB through Unix Domain Sockets

edwjusti · 2020-01-03T19:49:35Z

Windows supports AF_UNIX now. The dart runtime could simply throw an exception if support is not available. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/af_unix-comes-to-windows/

roman-vanesyan · 2020-01-04T18:03:40Z

Seems that the work to integrate this was actually begun, see https://dart-review.googlesource.com/c/sdk/+/125932

robert-ancell · 2020-01-05T22:40:32Z

Sending credentials using SCM_CREDENTIALS is a required feature for some Unix Domain Socket servers. I hope this can be integrated into the Dart API in some way.

DrSensor · 2020-02-03T18:36:01Z

What about IOS/Mac?
Similiar on how nodejs/libuv switch to named pipes when running on Windows, does this feature need to switch to Mach port to avoid sandboxing restrictions?

a-siva · 2020-03-17T23:50:44Z

flutter/flutter#44714 is blocked on this.

a-siva · 2020-03-17T23:52:51Z

work on this is progressing here https://dart-review.googlesource.com/c/sdk/+/125932

knopp · 2020-03-17T23:53:59Z

@a-siva, any reason why named pipes can't be used on windows, just like in libuv/nodejs?

a-siva · 2020-03-17T23:59:51Z

We will explore support on Windows after first getting this CL (Support on Linux, Macos and Android) to land.

Support Unix domain sockets communication on Linux, MacOS and Android. Changes: 1. Add a field for InternetAddressType named unix. 2. Constructor of InternetAddress gains one more optional field: type. InternetAddress(String address, {InternetAddressType type}); 3. Add another constructor to InternetAddress which taks raw address/path for ip/unix addresses as an argument. InternetAddress.fromRawAddress(Uint8List rawAddress, {InternetAddressType type}); The operation for unix domain sockets communication is basically the same as normal sockets except an InternetAddress with type unix should be passed. Change-Id: I6a1135bbdd7f4e4fc745ccf8f95dec5272b6839b Bug: #21403 Reviewed-on: https://dart-review.googlesource.com/c/sdk/+/125932 Commit-Queue: Zichang Guo <zichangguo@google.com> Reviewed-by: Siva Annamalai <asiva@google.com>

zichangg · 2020-03-23T23:44:46Z

The change has been landed. I open #41161 for supporting on Windows.

banalg · 2020-04-14T18:24:46Z

Good news, but I didn't succeed creating a socket SOCK_SEQPACKET, requested for some services like uv4l.
Searching in the commit it seems we can only use SOCK_DGRAM and SOCK_STREAM.

Is it planned to accept others socket types ? http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/socket.2.html

An example of how it's done in Golang : https://golang.org/src/net/unixsock_posix.go

schultzter added Type-Enhancement library-io area-core-library SDK core library issues (core, async, ...); use area-vm or area-web for platform specific libraries. labels Apr 20, 2015

kevmoo added type-enhancement A request for a change that isn't a bug and removed triaged labels Mar 1, 2016

refi64 mentioned this issue Nov 13, 2019

Support UNIX domain sockets in dart:io flutter/flutter#44715

Closed

a-siva added this to the D28 Release milestone Dec 12, 2019

a-siva assigned zichangg Dec 12, 2019

zichangg mentioned this issue Mar 23, 2020

Support Unix domain socket on Windows #41161

Open

zichangg closed this as completed Mar 26, 2020

HidenoriMatsubayashi mentioned this issue May 13, 2020

Support UNIX Domain Sockets grpc/grpc-dart#299

Closed

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Support Unix Sockets in dart:io #21403

Support Unix Sockets in dart:io #21403

schultzter commented Oct 23, 2014

lrhn commented Oct 24, 2014

DartBot commented Nov 14, 2014

DartBot commented Apr 20, 2015

sgjesse commented Apr 20, 2015

DartBot commented Apr 20, 2015

zoechi commented Dec 11, 2015

sgjesse commented Dec 11, 2015

zoechi commented Dec 11, 2015

sgjesse commented Dec 11, 2015

zoechi commented Dec 11, 2015

Pajn commented Aug 5, 2016

bergwerf commented Jul 31, 2017

zoechi commented Jul 31, 2017

bergwerf commented Jul 31, 2017

Hixie commented Oct 8, 2017 •

edited

knopp commented Mar 3, 2018 •

edited

recoilme commented Apr 18, 2019

roman-vanesyan commented Jun 11, 2019 •

edited

knopp commented Jun 11, 2019

ailabs-software commented Jun 23, 2019

rahul-dutt-sharma commented Jun 28, 2019 •

edited

ghost commented Jul 3, 2019

radzish commented Oct 20, 2019

edwjusti commented Jan 3, 2020

roman-vanesyan commented Jan 4, 2020

robert-ancell commented Jan 5, 2020

DrSensor commented Feb 3, 2020

a-siva commented Mar 17, 2020

a-siva commented Mar 17, 2020

knopp commented Mar 17, 2020

a-siva commented Mar 17, 2020

zichangg commented Mar 23, 2020

banalg commented Apr 14, 2020 •

edited

Support Unix Sockets in dart:io #21403

Support Unix Sockets in dart:io #21403

Comments

schultzter commented Oct 23, 2014

lrhn commented Oct 24, 2014

DartBot commented Nov 14, 2014

DartBot commented Apr 20, 2015

sgjesse commented Apr 20, 2015

DartBot commented Apr 20, 2015

zoechi commented Dec 11, 2015

sgjesse commented Dec 11, 2015

zoechi commented Dec 11, 2015

sgjesse commented Dec 11, 2015

zoechi commented Dec 11, 2015

Pajn commented Aug 5, 2016

bergwerf commented Jul 31, 2017

zoechi commented Jul 31, 2017

bergwerf commented Jul 31, 2017

Hixie commented Oct 8, 2017 • edited

knopp commented Mar 3, 2018 • edited

recoilme commented Apr 18, 2019

roman-vanesyan commented Jun 11, 2019 • edited

knopp commented Jun 11, 2019

ailabs-software commented Jun 23, 2019

rahul-dutt-sharma commented Jun 28, 2019 • edited

ghost commented Jul 3, 2019

radzish commented Oct 20, 2019

edwjusti commented Jan 3, 2020

roman-vanesyan commented Jan 4, 2020

robert-ancell commented Jan 5, 2020

DrSensor commented Feb 3, 2020

a-siva commented Mar 17, 2020

a-siva commented Mar 17, 2020

knopp commented Mar 17, 2020

a-siva commented Mar 17, 2020

zichangg commented Mar 23, 2020

banalg commented Apr 14, 2020 • edited

Hixie commented Oct 8, 2017 •

edited

knopp commented Mar 3, 2018 •

edited

roman-vanesyan commented Jun 11, 2019 •

edited

rahul-dutt-sharma commented Jun 28, 2019 •

edited

banalg commented Apr 14, 2020 •

edited