Sorry, the rest of the conversation seemed to be assuming that "whether you have received the full message" is well-defined at the level of TCP, as suggested by the original comment where I joined[1]:
>I had to fight a coworker on this. I had quickly created some client code just to validate that the server was working. Due to some quirk, all the messages were arriving in full in every read call. He told me to ship it.
>I said no! "I need to check if there's more data and if so add a loop to read again" "But it is working, release it". That went on for a while, to no avail. Wouldn't look at documentation either.
I was just going along with that.
I didn't check up on TCP further to verify whether this was actually true; if you are saying that's not a well-defined concept, you might want to reply to that comment to say so.