[issue16201] socket.gethostbyname incorrectly parses ip

[Charles-François Natali]

Charles-François Natali added the comment:

Stupid question: why use scanf()/strtol() to parse an IP address, and not simply inet_pton()/inet_aton(), which are made precisely for that purpose?
inet_pton() is POSIX (it was introduced at the same time as getaddrinfo(), which is used unconditionally a couple lines below). If it's not available, we could use inet_aton() as fallback (which is amusingly not POSIX, but I doubt we'll find a platform with neither inet_pton() nor inet_aton()).

Using inet_pton() would have the added advantage of working with IPv6 addresses: right now, a numeric IPv6 address is always resolved by getaddrinfo(), which results in a performance overhead:

$ python -m timeit -s "from socket import *; s = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM); DATA = 'hello'" "s.sendto(DATA, ('127.0.0.1', 42))"
100000 loops, best of 3: 6.86 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s "from socket import *; s = socket(AF_INET6, SOCK_DGRAM); DATA = 'hello'" "s.sendto(DATA, ('::1', 42))"
10000 loops, best of 3: 24.2 usec per loop

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nosy: +neologix

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue16201>
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