proposal: io,net: add WriteMany interface

[Jorropo]

Proposal Details

This proposal aims at making a user-implementable version of net.Buffers.

Add a new interface to io and implement it on net.* which implement net.buffersWriter:

type ManyWriter interface {
 // WriteMany has the same semantics as appending the buffers back to back into one buffer and calling [Writer.Write] method,
 // but it allows to remove the need to allocate and copy all the buffers in one contiguous memory region.
 // The implementation cannot write to any of the passed buffer or buffers slice.
 WriteMany(...[]byte) (n int64, err error)
}

note: this return int64 because it would be easy to build let's say 16GiB buffer on a 32bits pointer architecture by having the byte arrays alias each other.

(*net.Buffers).WriteTo would also check if the underlying implementation supports io.ManyWriter as well as net.buffersWriter.

[gabyhelp]

Related Issues and Documentation

• proposal: io: add interface type StringBytesWriter #25464 (closed)
• net: export writeBuffers() and buffersWriter #21756 (closed)

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[Jorropo]

opening as a formal proposal to solve #21676, feel free to close a dup

[Jorropo]

And in case of rehashing arguments from #21676 the problem I am seeing:
I have protocol with <small header> | <big payload> and a method like this:

func (*T) WritePayload(b []byte) error

Here are the possible solutions today and why they are not that good:

1. Nagle's algorithm
   add latency in the pipeline, plus does not solve the double syscall overhead (with double digit Gbit/s TCP I have many profiles with >60% of time spent in syscall.Syscall6 doing TCP)
2. net.Buffers
   it is not composable, in most of my usecases I have a TCPConn wrapped in TLS, HTTP or yamux.
3. bufio.Writer
   still do two .Write call, the header is small enough to be fully buffered, then the payload is written to, it does not fit into the buffer, so bufio.Writer flushes the header and then pass the payload as-is in a second .Write call.
   • note: if we had such interface it would be useful to optimize this codepath so it use .WriteMany to write the buffered portion and the inbound payload in one call, would be done conditionally with a conditional type assertion but that would be a future proposal if something like this one passes.
4. manually doing t.underlying.Write(append(header, payload...))
   generate garbage
5. do solution 4 but store buffers in a receiver field and recycle them
   this double the memory usage of this one implementation / consumer pair and does not remove the cost of copying bytes around (worst CPU cache utilization)
6. re-architecture the code to do dma style buffer access in callbacks (func (*T) WritePayload(n uint, func(dest []byte) error) error)
   create callback hell when composed and is not always possible (I don't always know the maximum size of the payload ahead of time)

[jfrech]

Does defining a dual io.ManyReader have any known applications?

[Jorropo]

@jfrech ManyReader ¿ not ManyWriter ?

Idk this is not this proposal feel free to open an other one.