I just got an unexpected problem. I try to use raw sockets from ktor-network to work with home-made TCP-based protocol. And I can't see how I can use Input/Output API with it. It seems like socket IO lives in a completely different world. For example, instead WritableByteChannel I have ByteWriteChannel, which seems to be unrelated. The problem is that I already have ktor-io based code that work with files and it would be very sad to have to re-do it for Ktor sockets. Are there any solutions to this?

Hey @altavir, it looks like you’re trying to use sockets from

java.nio.channels

. You can use

aSocket

method to create a socket from ktor-network

I am using

connection = aSocket(ActorSelectorManager(<http://Dispatchers.IO|Dispatchers.IO>))
    .tcp().connect(InetSocketAddress(host, port)).connection()

and trying to use connection

Yep, and the connection has

input

and

output

primitives from ktor-io

public class Connection(
    public val socket: Socket,
    public val input: ByteReadChannel,
    public val output: ByteWriteChannel
)

I don't see any way of converting ByteWriteChannel to Output

Yep, there are no common blocking adapters on this

Is it possible to somehow convert them to Input/Output? I can avoid using Ktor and wrap regular java channels, but it seems like a bit of waste (not using ktor to access ktor).

There are no working adapters like this

😞

I’m still not sure that making blocking adapters for streaming cases is a good idea

I am not saying you should. But having single abstraction for input/ouput is very important.

Could you give me a hint on the use cases you have?

If you have blocking calls they could be called from suspend functions. Not vice versa of course. But it seems to be possbile to have suspending writers implement blocking calls .

I’m not sure that I clearly get it

I will see if I have time to implement an Input/Output wrapper on top of ByteRead/WriteChannel. By the way, the name is misleading because it is easy to confuse with WritableByteChannel