unicornucopious

I wrote about my effort to learn sockets programming properly. For two weeks, every day, I wrote a simple socket server in C, from memory as much as possible.

It paid off this last week at work, when I finished a draft of a proxy server that sits between an existing server and a Flash client. A proxy is both a server and a client, so all my new skills were used, albeit in C# not C. The nice thing about sockets is that the API is fairly standard for all technologies - Unix and Windows have similar C API's, and all higher level languages simply wrap around them.

I'm so glad I learned the C first, since the standard API is lean. There are about 6 - 8 functions to learn to use.

Had I attacked this issue starting with C#, I'm certain I would have failed. The "user-friendly" wrappers contain a lot of distracting material. Furthermore, the MSDN documentation for class members always includes a program that does eight things, instead of being distilled down to the one thing I want to do.

So, here's to the distillation of problems down to their simplest atoms. I'll take bind(), accept(), and send() over SocketInformation, SocketInformationOptions, SocketFlags, and SocketOptionName any day.