Handling TcpStream or SslStream idiomatically

Question

I'm working on a project that can use either TcpStreams or SslStreams, depending on what the user configured. I have a few simple methods such as send_cmd(stream) and recv_msg(stream) which operates on these streams.

Would it be more idiomatic to create an enum that could be either TcpStream or SslStream and pass that to these methods? Or would it be better to do something with traits, such as requiring the stream argument to these methods implement the Read and Write traits?

My thought is that the enum solution would be better, as it explicitly says what kind of data we expect to be handling instead of allowing for anything that implements Read or Write, such as files. On the flip side though, it would require a match on all of these methods before using the stream. Thoughts?

This is similar to http://stackoverflow.com/q/37223741/5189607. — malbarbo, May 19 '16 at 21:50
What benefit does your code (or users of your code) gain by limiting to only two concrete types? — Shepmaster, May 20 '16 at 01:30
@Shepmaster: It's an API implementation to a service only available over tcp. — vimalloc, May 20 '16 at 02:01
That doesn't provide a benefit to limiting the types, it's just an implementation detail. What about dependency injection during testing or adding a logging layer for debugging or a compression layer or a ... — Shepmaster, May 20 '16 at 02:04

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 06 '16 at 00:26

1

Turns out there is a solution for this built into the openssl library: openssl::ssl::MaybeSslStream.

edited Jun 06 '16 at 00:26

Chris Morgan

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answered May 20 '16 at 15:27

vimalloc

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Handling TcpStream or SslStream idiomatically

1 Answers1