On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 2:45 AM Cristian Morales Vega <cristian@samknows.com> wrote:

I have not used the synchronous API at all. But section 3.1 of P1269R0 seems to make a good point about the lack of timeouts in synchronous calls, doesn't it? beast::basic_stream makes using timeouts in the async API way simpler, but is the sync API really basically unusable because of the lack of timeouts thing?

Synchronous APIs are perfectly fine. Asio defines SyncReadStream and SyncWriteStream named requirements, allowing for generic algorithms to be implemented. Not everything is a socket (for example, a serial port). A synchronous stream represents the reliable, in-order delivery of bytes using functions that block, nothing more and nothing less. For example, serial file I/O can be represented using a synchronous stream. If the synchronous stream requirements mandated timeouts, it would eliminate a broad set of implementations (including sockets on some platforms).