Socket vs. multiprocessing.connection.Listener in python

Question

I know there are different ways to implement IPC in python such as Pipes and Queue; But according to the Python's official documentation, There is also an alternative way called Listener and Client.

multiprocessing.connection.Listener is much like socket and both got same functions like accept() , close() , send() and recv(). So if we only focus on IPC purpose , whats difference between these two modules? Which one is more efficient ?

Answer 1

Socket Families

I looked at cpython on github, multiprocessing.connection.Listener uses socket standard library with just one main different point : socket families.

Listeners support these families for communication :

• AF_PIPE - Named pipe
• AF_INET - TCP socket
• AF_UNIX - Unix domain socket

Python's standard socket library supports AF_INET and AF_UNIX well, so we can surely say that the main difference is about AF_PIPE family.