Introduction

sockpp is a simple, modern, C++ network socket library.

It is a fairly low-level C++ wrapper around the Berkeley sockets library using socket, acceptor, and connector classes that are familiar concepts from other languages.

The base socket class wraps a system socket handle and maintains its lifetime using the familiar RAII pattern. When the C++ object goes out of scope, it closes the underlying socket handle. Socket objects are generally movable but not copyable. A socket can be transferred from one scope (or thread) to another using std::move().

Features

The library currently supports:

• Portable socket classes across Linux, Mac, and Windows.
  • Other *nix and POSIX systems are untested, but should work with little or no modification.
• IPv4 and IPv6 on all supported platforms.
• Unix-Domain Sockets on *nix systems that have an OS implementation for them.
  • Windows support might be possible, if there was any interest.
• connector classes for easy client creation.
• acceptor classes for easy server creation.
• address classes for easy network address manipulation.
• [Experimental] CANbus raw sockets on Linux for SocketCAN.
• [Experimental, Coming Soon] Secure TLS sockets with OpenSSL and MbedTLS

Support for secure sockets using either the OpenSSL or MbedTLS libraries was recently started with basic coverage. This will continue to be expanded in the near future.

There is also some experimental support for CAN bus programming on Linux using the SocketCAN subsystem. SocketCAN creates virtual network interfaces to read and write packets onto a physical CAN bus using raw sockets.

Note that sockpp releases observe semantic versioning, but any features marked as experimental are being actively developed, and are not bound by those constraints. Experimental features may have breaking changes within the same major version.

C++ Language Details

sockpp v2.x targets C++17, and makes use of many of the language features from this version, so a compatible compiler is required. Recent versions of gcc, clang, and MSVC have all been tested and should suffice.

The library provides C++ classes that wrap the Berkeley Socket C API, creating different socket types for the different and protocol amd address families. This makes for easy socket creation depending on the required uses.

All code in the library lives within the sockpp C++ namespace. A number of common collection types from the standard library are imported from the std namespace into the sockpp namespace. Thus, for example, the string type in sockpp is the std::string type. Thus a std::string is a sockpp::string.

The sockpp API generally avoids throwing exceptions, prefering instead to return a generic result type from functions. This is a type of union or variant that can contain the generic return type on success, or an error type on failure. The error is based on a C++ error_code. For functions that can not return a value, such as constructors, there are typically two matching functions: one with the required parameters, and another with the same parameters and an additional parameter which is a reference to an error_code. The first will throw an exception on error. The second is marked as noexcept and sets the error code on failure.