Should Dial return a net.Conn?

[mjohnson9]

cc @shurcooL

Pending release of gopherjs/gopherjs#89,

Should Dial return a net.Conn?

I believe the idiomatic Go way would be to follow the guidelines of net.TCPConn (& co.) in having a WebSocket(Conn) that is exported and fulfills net.Conn, but have Dial return a net.Conn and allow type-assertion if the consumer needs the low-level functionality of the WebSocket(Conn).

This refactor would, more than likely, break API compatibility.

Thoughts?

[dmitshur]

I think that's the way to go. It should be done on a branch for now, of course.

[extemporalgenome]

If we're talking about net.Dial, I suggest that we only support "ws" as the network type in browsers. Node and other targets could presumably support "tcp" and the other standard targets, but it would hurt code portability (and be potentially very confusing to debug) if net.Dial("tcp", addr) spoke websocket on the wire.

[mjohnson9]

@extemporalgenome

We're talking about websocket.Dial. Is there a way to register a new net type with net.Dial?

[mjohnson9]

Working on this in the dial-net-conn-again branch.

[mjohnson9]

Sorry, I've been delayed on this. I'm unassigning myself for now. Feel free to take over; I didn't make any significant progress.

[dmitshur]

No problem. This is not a high priority since it doesn't change functionality (much or at all). One of us will get to it when the time is right and/or we're implementing something else.

[dmitshur]

One observation I've made is that the websocket.Dial API differs slightly between this package and golang.org/x/net/websocket. See, e.g., here.

Perhaps the two APIs can be made to match. Or perhaps not if it's out of scope for this library. This is just an observation so far.

[dmitshur]

Is it correct that the desktop websocket needs the origin to be supplied since it can be controlled, but in the browser, the browser sets it automatically and it cannot be overridden? If so, then it may not be possible to make the two APIs match.

[mjohnson9]

That's correct. From within the browser, it isn't possible to set the origin. However, the desired protocol can be specified. I think you're right about making the two APIs match as closely as is reasonable.

[dmitshur]

It's convenient for me to implement this now, so I'll take this.