networking

C/C++ networking examples for educational purposes.

About

A first exploration into computer networking, mostly focusing on use of TCP/IP connections via native socket implementations. I first started out with some C examples directly using operating system C APIs but have slowly built a header-only C++ abstraction layer to ease cross-platform development since Windows Sockets 2 does things a bit differently compared to the typical POSIX sockets implementation.

The C programs and C support library is written in ANSI C and should be C99-compatible while the C++ programs and the C++ support library are written in C++17. Moving to C++20 is of interest but is not a high priority currently.

Contents

TBD. Currently includes client-server pairs for simple message acknowledgment and for message echoing.

Building from source

CMake >=3.21 is required to build from source on all platforms.

*nix

Building is easy with the provided build.sh build script. For usage, type

./build.sh --help

To build release binaries for this project, simply use the command

./build.sh -c Release

Simply typing ./build.sh will build unoptimized binaries with debug symbols.

By default, the pdnnnet support library is built as a shared library, requiring that PDNNET_DLL be defined during compilation. To explicitly request that pdnnet be built as a static library, one should specify -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=0. E.g. to build release binaries with pdnnet built as a static library, one can use the command

./build.sh -c Release -Ca -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=0

Windows

Building is easy with the provided build.bat build script. For usage, type

build --help

To build release binaries for this project, simple use the command

build -c Release

Simply typing build will build unoptimized binaries and the program database with debugging info. You can specify the target architecture using the -a flag, e.g. to build 64-bit release binaries instead of the default 32-bit ones, use

build -a x64 -c Release

Currently, the Visual Studio toolset used will be whichever is the default.

By default, the pdnnet support library is built as a shared library, requiring that PDNNET_DLL be defined during compilation. To explicitly request that pdnnet be built as a static library, one should specify -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=0. E.g. to build 32-bit release binaries with pdnnet built as a static library, one can use the command

build -c Release -Ca "-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=0"

The extra double quotes are needed to prevent the = from confusing CMD.