Copyright (c) 2002-2024 Timothy Charlton Arland tcarland@gmail.com, tca@charltontechnology.net

tcanetpp is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

tcanetpp is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with tcanetpp.
If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

The 'tcanetpp' library is a C++ library for providing core networking functionality with an object-oriented interface. The library additionally contains a collection of utility classes that are not all necessarily networking specific, but are frequently used in such a context.

The library has been used in production software and has been refined over many years. At the heart, it provides an Object-Oriented Socket class that wraps the Standard Library socket functions as well as (WIN32) Winsock2, providing a cross-platform implementation.

The general goal is to provide core network functionality based solely on Berkeley Sockets, libc, and libstdc++, with no other dependencies (with the exception of pthreads for the Thread-related classes). While written in C++, the overall design is intended to be not-so object heavy with as little inter-dependency as possible, such that by use of any one feature of the library (eg. event api) does not depend on other features of the library.

Celebrating 20 years as a project, it has evolved much over the years to stay relatively current to the C++ standards, but remaining lean and usable. While there may be better options for some components, especially when adopting libboost, some components are still very useful today.

libtcanetpp provides the following core functionality:

• Containers: Patricia/Radix trie, Hashmap, Circular Buffer, Synchronized Queue
• Event Management for handling both network I/O and sub-second timers
• Threads: An interface for managing pthreads and pthread mutexes
• Network: Socket and IP functions for manipulating IPv4 and IPv6 Addresses
• Logging: A thread-safe logging facility

The library has few external dependencies outside of libc. The project can build an additional individual library for the command buffer class. The pthreads library dependency is needed for the various Thread classes and librt is also used on linux systems for the event api.

The project uses the tcamake build environment for managing project dependencies. This provides a Makefile template for projects. To build, the tcamake project should be pulled down to the parent directory of the project.

cd ..
git clone https://github.com/tcarland/tcamake
cd tcanetpp
export TCAMAKE_PROJECT=1

Select a build profile and run make.

source resources/profile_release_mt
make

• Unix:
  The library requires linking libpthread, librt and libdl. The librt library should be included on linux systems, especially for the high-resolution timer support provided by the EventManager.

• Mac OSX:
  tcamake is needed in addition to the gnu tools (provided with xcode).

• Win32/64: Only the thread classes (based on libpthread are unsupported with windows. The win32 pthread library is mostly be compatible, but ymmv.

The library is documented using doxygen. Run make documentation to generate the docs (doxygen required).