Berkeley Socket facade for WinRT Networking plausibility?

Question

This is a copy of a post I've sent to the ZeroMQ mailing list. However, the question is raises it not specific to ZeroMQ, but more generally regarding the need for a 'mapping' layer over the networking functionality provided in WinRT to provide a more normal 'Berkeley Socket facade' for C++ code when compiling against WinRT:

Hi all, I've used ZeroMQ in a mobile app (see http://www.ibuzzedfirst.com ) previously, for the iPhone and Android versions, as those platforms support native/C++/Socket development, and therefore ZeroMQ.

For the WindowsPhone 7.5 (OS 7.1) version, I had to re-implement any required ZeroMQ functionality from scratch, as WinPhone 7.5 only supports C#, not C++ (it's effectively a C# Silverlight App). Also, WinPhone 7.5 only provides its own 'version' of Socket support ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sb27wehh%28v=vs.95%29.aspx ) which only support Async versions of functions, e.g. ConnectAsync, SendAync, ReceiveAsync etc. However, the lack of C++ made this a moot point.

As such, for the WindowsPhone 7.5 version, I restricted the app to 'client' (Contestant) functionalty only, and didn't implement the 'server' (Quiz Master) part. This was because the client part of the app only sends and receives requests, replies and subscriptions to the server, whereas the server utilises the inherent multi-threaded multi-user functionality of ZeroMQ. It was (relatively) simple to recreate the ZeroMQ transport protocol/headers for client use, and use the WindowsPhone Socket support to provide comms.

Ok, now I'm looking at porting the app to WinRT on Windows 8. (The desktop/tablet version first - the Windows Phone 8 RT SDK isn't out yet, but will be similar). The good news is that C++ is supported in WinRT, yay! (Actually, it still isn't that simple, when writing C# only WinRT apps, you can compile for 'AnyCPU', as soon as you include a C++ portion, you have to build 3 different versions - x86/Win32, x64, and ARM versions, but that's a different problem).

Unfortunately though, like Windows 7/8 Phone, WinRT does NOT support 'normal' Berkeley Socket access, but instead offers its own 'version' of Socket programming, with discrete classes for different socket scenarios, e.g. StreamSocket for a connecting TCP client ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/windows.networking.sockets.streamsocket.aspx#methods ), StreamSocketListener for a bindable TCP server ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/windows.networking.sockets.streamsocketlistener.aspx#methods ), and DatagramSocket / DatagramSocketListener for the UDP versions. Furthermore, only async versions of all the methods are provided.

So it looks like, to get ZeroMQ to compile sucessfully on WinRT, I'm going to have to write a Facade layer that provdes a Berkeley Socket-like C++ interface, and underneath performs the necessary mapping to the version of Socket programming provided by WinRT.

Has anyone else started this journey or written a similar facade? Interested to hear everyone's thoughts, especailly as WinRT looks to quite a 'big thing'!

Answer 1

Though its far from complete or correct and has lots of bugs, but I have started this project here https://winrtsock.codeplex.com. Have not implemented any listen/accept as of yet