impl Stream/Sink for UdpSocket

[canndrew]

I'd like to use a UdpSocket as a Stream/Sink of (SocketAddr, Vec<u8>). Is there a reason these impls don't already exist? I'm aware I can use Framed, but I'd prefer not to have to write a UdpCodec for converting bytes to bytes. IMHO UdpCodec belongs in some higher-level library and tokio-core should just provide a UDP API for sending/receiving packets of bytes.

[alexcrichton]

Thanks for the report! This sort of raises similar questions to tokio-rs/tokio-io#78 in that it's not clear what the right type is here (Vec<u8>? a reference counted buffer? etc).

I could imagine though that having a codec or two baked in would also be fine though!

[canndrew]

I'm fine with either Bytes or Vec<u8>, I just think it's odd that I need to use a codec to do this since a UDP socket is already a stream of byte-chunks. I'm forced to go up a level of abstraction, then use BytesCodec to go back down.

An alternative, (though it may be less efficient, I haven't thought about this too hard), would be to have Sink/Stream adapters that turn a sink/stream of Bytes into a sink/stream of T where T: Serialize/Deserialize.

[alexcrichton]

Indeed yeah! There's crate like tokio-serde-bincode to do that for you

[cramertj]

@canndrew Would tokio-rs/tokio-io#82 help solve your usecase?

[canndrew]

That would certainly be a more efficient of way doing it, I see the problem now with just making UdpSocket a Stream of Bytes. Maybe what I really want is for Stream::Item to have a lifetime parameter so that a Stream can return a &mut [u8] to an internal buffer. hmm...