Introduction
Packeteer is a cross-platform networking abstraction with a socket-like interface, providing datagram capabilities as first class citizens.
The design of this library goes back a long time, before networking code was anywhere near standardization in C++. While this is changing, even now the majority of abstractions over sockets in C++ assume a connection-oriented design, which on the Internet implies TCP/IP.
However, in order to implement protocols that do not follow the connection paradigm, a datagram oriented API is also required. This typically also requires a more reactive API that responds to network I/O events rather than simply waiting.
Packeteer abstracts out platform differences between sockets and socket-like APIs such as named or anonymous pipes. It furthermore provides an event-driven I/O interface, and fully supports multi-threaded I/O. In fact, adding multiple I/O threads is as easy as providing a configuration flag in the initialization code.
Unlike other I/O event libraries, packeteer does not leak any platform-specific abstraction into application code. In doing so, it is possible to add extensions to packeteer that follow the same general API – stream or datagram oriented I/O – without building on operating system handles or file descriptors.