Socket++

Socket++ is w C++ class library that simplifies the usage of networking/internet sockets by making socket programming a part of the C++ IOStream.

Socket++ is something of a classic, it was one of the first open source C++ libraries to emerge in the 80s and had already matured by the early 90s, with minimal upkeep ever since mostly to make it compile correctly with modern compilers, the last version bump was in response to a text change in the license which should give you an indication of how little development it has seen, and needed, in the last few years. Although not as vital a tool as it was in years gone by it still sees widespread use.

Versions

 * OS/2 Ports
 * 1.11 for Watcom was done by Gordon Zeglinski, he apparently did not release his versions but detailed in an article (link below) what (minimal) changes he did to make it work.
 * 1.11 for VisualAge C++ by Paul Elliott, it had an extension for unnamed pipes that do not exist in Unix.
 * Development version
 * 1.12.13 (2011-12-27)
 * This is functionally the same to the above 1.11 ports from the 90s but should compile more cleanly with recent versions of GCC with the possible lack of some non-internet socket types due to non-support by the OS/2 TCP/IP stack, that should not present a functionality problem in most cases. However the way Unix and OS/2 opens an IOStream differ, but if you are using GCC you are probably using the Unix style anyway.

Articles

 * Adding socket support to the iostreams hierarchy

Licence

 * Open source software released under the One Clause BSD License without the disclaimer
 * Authors:
 * Gnanasekaran Swaminathan (Original author)
 * Herbert Straub (Current maintainer)

Links

 * Socket++ homepage
 * Older homepage: http://members.aon.at/hstraub/linux/socket++/
 * A copy of Paul Elliott's original VAC++ port homepage: https://web.archive.org/web/20050204130821/http://www.io.com/~pelliott/pme/socket/readme.html