net/http: Server panics with non-comparable Listener (because of map[net.Listener]struct{})

[pam4]

https://play.golang.org/p/_O9zzZhdd-z

Usually net.Listeners are pointers, therefore comparable, but I would expect non-pointer net.Listeners to work just fine.
If my expectation is correct, perhaps this behavior should be documented.
Or the type of Server.listeners could be changed to map[*net.Listener]struct{}.

[andybons]

@bradfitz

[bradfitz]

This is true, but there's no real fix, and it doesn't seem worth documenting. Last time this came up, it seemed hypothetical at best and an audit of custom net.Listener types in the wild found they were all comparable anyway.

If we document too much, the docs become bloated and less valuable.

If we did document it somewhere, I'd do it on the net.Listener type and not in net/http at all. The net.Listener type might say "Implementations of Listener are often expected to be comparable." or something. But I'd rather not document that either.

I'm going to close this, but let me know if this actual arose in practice. That might warrant docs. But if it's just hypothetical, I'd prefer to do nothing.

[pam4]

@bradfitz

This is true, but there's no real fix

Maybe you are right that it is not worth doing, but there is a fix.
Listeners only get in from Server.Serve, therefore the map could be a map[*net.Listener]struct{} and you could just use &l as key (l being the argument of Server.Serve).
I don't know about performance but it seems that it would require minimal change, just a few indirections.
I'm assuming that calling Server.Serve twice with the same listener is an error anyway.
Am I missing something?

I'm going to close this, but let me know if this actual arose in practice.

No, it didn't, I was just reading the code.
My thought was that merging multiple objects as anonymous fields of a struct is quite common, and if one of those is a net.Listener and another is a non-comparable type, than you have it.
Of course all you have to do is to pass the address of such struct to Server.Serve instead of the struct itself, but it may be confusing why the struct itself doesn't work.

I understand the concern about bloating the documentation, therefore if you understood my points and prefer to do nothing I'm satisfied with it.

[bradfitz]

Oh! I thought we did more with it than we do. Storing a pointer to interface sounds fine.

Want to send the change?

[pam4]

Thanks for your reply, I'm not ready to contribute at the moment.
If someone wants to do it before I get around to it, take a look at this git diff to see what I mean (passes tests):
https://pastebin.com/yiaK0tGY

[gopherbot]

Change https://golang.org/cl/106657 mentions this issue: net/http: don't crash if Server.Server is called with non-comparable Listener