Inconsistency between SOCKET types makes WinSock interop with Rust's UdpSocket nontrivial

[recatek]

Suggestion

This was initially brought up in #1643, but the discussion was focused primarily on HANDLE, and was closed.

Rust's built-in UdpSocket has a Windows-only as_raw_socket method that converts it into a std::os::windows::io::RawSocket, which is an alias for std::os::windows::raw::SOCKET, a u64. WinSock methods like WSAIoctl require an IntoParam<SOCKET> using windows::Win32::Networking::WinSock::SOCKET, which wraps a usize.

Since the as_raw_socket method is Windows-only to begin with, it would be nice if these two types interfaced better or had a consistent representation (perhaps ideally just using std::os::windows::raw::SOCKET).

See also rust-lang/rust#76253

[riverar]

Interesting. Thanks for bringing this up.

Rust has a Windows-specific socket primitive defined as such:

#[cfg(target_pointer_width = "32")]
#[doc(cfg(all()))]
#[stable(feature = "raw_ext", since = "1.1.0")]
pub type SOCKET = u32;
#[cfg(target_pointer_width = "64")]
#[doc(cfg(all()))]
#[stable(feature = "raw_ext", since = "1.1.0")]
pub type SOCKET = u64;

I'm curious how this missed becoming a usize. 🤔 Looks like the last message on rust-lang/rust#76253 was promising, maybe worth also trying to restart those std discussions?

[recatek]

Good point, I left a comment there pointing out the inconsistency and including the windows crate version for reference.

[ChrisDenton]

The standard library has strong stability guarantees (i.e. we try not to break existing code) and that issue was last active three years ago. I'm doubtful that we can change it now (but it would be good if we could).

[kennykerr]

SOCKET is defined as UINT_PTR which is a pointer-sized unsigned integer, which is what Rust's usize is.

Closing as there's nothing for windows-rs to do here, but feel free to keep the conversation going.