Both read and write operations support variants where either a) a single
call is made to the undelying stream implementation and returned buffer
length may be less than requested, or b) calls are repeated until requested
amount of data is collected, shorter amount is returned only in case of
EOF or error.
These operations are available from the level of C support functions to be
used by other C modules to implementations of Python methods to be used in
user-facing objects.
The rationale of these changes is to allow to write concise and robust
code to work with *blocking* streams of types prone to short reads, like
serial interfaces and sockets. Particular object types may select "exact"
vs "once" types of methods depending on their needs. E.g., for sockets,
revc() and send() methods continue to be "once", while read() and write()
thus converted to "exactly" versions.
These changes don't affect non-blocking handling, e.g. trying "exact"
method on the non-blocking socket will return as much data as available
without blocking. No data available is continued to be signaled as None
return value to read() and write().
From the point of view of CPython compatibility, this model is a cross
between its io.RawIOBase and io.BufferedIOBase abstract classes. For
blocking streams, it works as io.BufferedIOBase model (guaranteeing
lack of short reads/writes), while for non-blocking - as io.RawIOBase,
returning None in case of lack of data (instead of raising expensive
exception, as required by io.BufferedIOBase). Such a cross-behavior
should be optimal for MicroPython needs.
This is strange asymmetry which is sometimes needed, e.g. for WebREPL: we
want to process only available input and no more; but for output, we want
to get rid of all of it, because there's no other place to buffer/store
it. This asymmetry is akin to CPython's asyncio asymmetry, where reads are
asynchronous, but writes are synchronous (asyncio doesn't expect them to
block, instead expects there to be (unlimited) buffering for any sync write
to completely immediately).
Paul Sokolovsky