Use threading and sockets in C in a platform independent way

Question

I need to write a programm which uses threads and sockets. What is the best way to do it for different platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac).

I know about POSIX, but there is no POSIX on Win.

Are there any libraries handling that in a platform independent way?

Answer 1

If you really want C (not C++), I suggest to use the standard POSIX threads on non-Windows platforms, and use pthreads-win32 on Windows. It supports both 32- and 64-bit, both MSVC and MinGW. It's current version (2.9.1) was released just one month ago, so the project is actively maintained. There's also a fork on github with some fixes in MSVC2010 project.

If C++ is also an option, I'd choose boost, because it's where the standard c++ evolves (the design of std::thread in c++11 is an evolution from boost::thread, etc.)

For the network part of your question, boost::asio is the best choice if C++ is OK for you, otherwise didn't see anything comparable in C. In particular, boost::asio supports I/O Completion Ports (IOCP) on Windows, which is critical for performance. boost::asio requires some time to learn, but in my personal opinion it worth every minute spent reading the documentation (which is great) and working with examples.