Clozure CL Documentation

8.1. Overview

Clozure CL supports the socket abstraction for interprocess communication. A socket represents a connection to another process, typically (but not necessarily) a TCP/IP network connection to a client or server running on some other machine on the network.

All symbols mentioned in this chapter are exported from the CCL package. As of version 0.13, these symbols are additionally exported from the OPENMCL-SOCKET package.

Clozure CL supports three types of sockets: TCP sockets, UDP sockets, and Unix-domain sockets. This should be enough for all but the most esoteric network situations. All sockets are created by make-socket. The type of socket depends on the arguments to it, as follows:

tcp-stream: A buffered bi-directional stream over a TCP/IP connection. tcp-stream is a subclass of stream, and you can read and write to it using all the usual stream functions. Created by (make-socket :address-family :internet :type :stream :connect :active ...) or by (accept-connection ...).
file-socket-stream: A buffered bi-directional stream over a "UNIX domain" connection. file-socket-stream is a subclass of stream, and you can read and write to it using all the usual stream functions. Created by (make-socket :address-family :file :type :stream :connect :active ...) or by (accept-connection ...),
listener-socket: A passive socket used to listen for incoming TCP/IP connections on a particular port. A listener-socket is not a stream. It doesn't support I/O. It can only be used to create new tcp-streams by accept-connection. Created by (make-socket :type :stream :connect :passive ...)
file-listener-socket: A passive socket used to listen for incoming UNIX domain connections named by a file in the local filesystem. A listener-socket is not a stream. It doesn't support I/O. It can only be used to create new file-socket-streams by accept-connection. Created by (make-socket :address-family :file :type :stream :connect :passive ...)
udp-socket: A socket representing a packet-based UDP/IP connection. A udp-socket supports I/O but it is not a stream. Instead, you must use the special functions send-to and receive-from to read and write to it. Created by (make-socket :type :datagram ...)