Know of any cross platform socket library (windows & Linux) in C?

Question

I am looking to do socket communications (listen, accept, connect, recv, send, disconnect) in both linux and windows. My project is in C, so unless someone can think of a way for me to integrate C++ libraries into a C project the library will have to be in C as well.

Ultimately, I would like the library to have ipv6 support and non-blocking mode, however, these things are not essential.

Does anyone know of any libraries/cross-platform example code? Even just large code snippets would help. So far the few socket libraries I have found have been in C++.

Answer 1

Off-hand, I can think of four libraries:

• GLib Channels from the GLib framework can abstract socket usage, but you'll need platform-specific code for socket creation.

• libuv is a platform abstraction layer for node.js and handles, among other things, sockets and async IO.

• The Apache Portable Runtime also contains network routines.

• The Netscape Portable Runtime does socket manipulation as well.

Answer 2

The plibsys library provides all the requested features: cross-platform and portable, lightweight, provides socket IPv4 and IPv6 support as well as many other useful things like multithreading. Works with sockets in non-blocking mode (though you can switch to a blocking one, too). Has quite a good documentation with the test code examples.