Sockets Programming

This is mor开发者_JAVA百科e of a general quick question. But in like C#,Python,C,C++.......etc

Are all the basic "Sockets" network programming essentially the same. Like do they all use the Berkley Sockets (i think thats what they are called) or does each language have it's own way of doing sockets.

Thanks

Sockets are platform-dependent, not language dependent. So, linux uses the BSD sockets alone, Windows offers both BSD sockets (used almost exclusively) and a M$ flavour of sockets (called WSA), dunno about others. It all boils to what is found under the hood - more exactly at the kernel level of the OS. The socket implementation found there will offer a first set of API in order to make them accessible to kernel/user space - usually through a shared object / dynamic linked library and thus "natively" supporting the c/c++ languages. All the other languages are relying on language specific bindings to those SO / DLL files offered by the OS natively for C/C++.

HTH

Sockets are basically the same in C, C++, Java, Ruby. They are slightly easier (because the build in classes handle the boiler plate) in higher level languages. If you can write Socket code in C, then you can do it anywhere if you have a reference to translate.

@Kellogs brings up a good point, Windows has their own Socket API which (typically) performs better (in my experiences) on Windows than the Posix implementations offered. The APIs are very similar. I would make the analogy of OpenGL to DirectX. If you really know one, then you can figure out the other with a reference.

Now a days we don't differentiate the language, the class library that can be accessed from the language and the underlying operating system. Here is my explanation

C,C++,C#,Java - Are just the languages has no specific support regarding the network programming.

Java class library, .Net Framework, C++ standard library - among this I think C# & Java provides some classes for network programming. C++ standard library does not provide any network programming classes (only iostreams for file, stdinput & strings are available). But BOOST library for C++ provides classes for network programming. I am not aware of the other libraries.

OS - The operating system proives a base api (mostly in C) that is utilised by the class libraries above. In case of windows it is the winsock api (WSA) and in case of unix it is the BSD socket api. I think windows also supports to some extent the BSD api so that the learning curve is less. But as @EnabrenTane said it is more than that.

Agree with kellogs above. Windows & most major POSIX-compliant OSs support the basic BSD socket API. In addition to the Berkeley socket, each platform provides additional proprietary API for performance & scalability enhancement. These extended APIs are not strictly confined to sockets only - they work on any I/O operations (i.e. disk files, named pipes etc.). For example, (in addition to traditional select() & poll()) Linux has it's own epoll mechanism, BSDs have kqueue, Windows has WSAevent*, WSAaAsync* and I/O completion ports APIs. These differences are visible mostly in lower level languages like C, C++ or Pascal.

C#, Java, Python, Ruby et al. are somewhat "higher level" compared to C - they provide robust technologies to insulate you from the low-level APIs. Instead of fiddling directly with the bare-bones socket API, you can use the extensive run-time class libraries provided with each platform. For example, to write a TCP/IP server in Python, you could simply use the SocketServer class. Similarly in C#, you can use WebClient to downlad files of the net. In C++, you have the Boost library. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from using raw socket API directly in your app.