Yeah that is an interesting question. I think if the provider of the socket interface could be sure that the client code using the interface would know about fl

Yeah that is an interesting question. I think if the provider of the socket interface could be sure that the client code using the interface would know about flush(), then it wouldn't need to set timers or anything like that to flush after X ms etc. However there wouldn't be any point, I think, to buffering up more than e.g. a MTU worth of bytes. So it wouldn't be delaying indefinitely.