A wrapper library for the BSD sockets API.

Why?

This library trades the series of getaddrinfo, socket, connect, bind, listen, etc. functions and their convoluted, casted arguments for just one function that takes two structs (configuration and output). By creatively using C99’s “designated initializers”, the configuration struct works rather like a configuration key/value hash; the output struct contains either the socket file descriptor or error information.

The sheer generality of the BSD sockets API also makes it rather unwieldy. While the sockets API can be used for a lot of esoteric things, there’s no reason common use cases such as opening a TCP socket to a given host and port should take dozens of lines of code.

Requirements

This depends on C99 and a POSIX environment. You’ve got one of those lying around somewhere, right?

Running the tests

To run the tests:

$ make test

Note that the tests create a couple short-lived sockets on port 8080, and if that port is already in use, the tests will fail. To run the tests on a different port, set the PORT environment variable:

$ env PORT=12345 make test

Future Development

Capturing other common use cases for sockets would be good.