[DGD] DGD 1.5.5

[bart at wotf.org]

On Wed, 15 Mar 2017 09:47:49 +0100, Felix A. Croes wrote
> bart at wotf.org wrote:
> 
> > With dgd supporting outbound tcp connections and this addition of udp,
> > 'vanilla' dgd supports most things the network extensions seem to be used for.
> > I do use the ability to open arbitrary ports, and there are some slight
> > differences in behavior.
> 
> The network extensions don't support UDP very well.  There is no notion
> of UDP connections, so all incoming packets on a UDP port are kept in
> the same buffer by the OS, from which DGD reads one packet once a while
> in between executing LPC code.
> 
> After the introduction of UDP connections, it becomes possible to 
> have a dedicated thread reading incoming UDP packets and storing 
> them in per- connection buffers.  That will make supporting 1000 UDP 
> users feasible, just like 1000 TCP users are now.

That would be a better approach indeed. I never liked the way udp works with
the network extensions. I did go along with how the original network package
handled this while creating the 1.2.x development version of the network
package, but that was purely driven by wanting to stick to the pre-existing
interfaces for backward compatibility.

> 
> > I suppose this also means being able to send udp datagrams from an udp user
> > object, but is it possible to initiate sending udp from dgd?
> 
> Not yet.  If the network extensions can be reworked to provide only that
> additional functionality, through for instance connect(addr, port, 
> "udp"), then as far as I'm concerned we can do away with the NETWORK_EXTENSIONS
> macro.

Far as far as I'm concerned, there is one other thing provided by the network
extensions which I use, the ability to open ports on demand. This is for
example useful for implementing passive ftp or similar protocols, but also it
means I can add network services (or remove them) without having to
reconfigure and restart DGD to add/remove ports.

But as a general idea, I agree, and it would be nice if it can be removed. We
are certainly a lot closer to that then a couple years ago, I'd say, almost there.

Bart.
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