Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!mit-eddie!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: C binding interfaces for TCP/IP
Message-ID: <7148@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 21 Jan 88 15:41:36 GMT
References: <25@vdelta.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 25

In article <25@vdelta.UUCP> dave@vdelta.UUCP (Dave Arnold) writes:
>Are there efforts underway to standardize a C language interface for TCP/IP?

Many vendors provide 4BSD-compatible socket-oriented library routines,
which may consist of a mixture of system call interfaces and user-mode
algorithms, or some emulation that accomplishes the same thing.

AT&T recently defined a Transport Level Interface standard, which is
somewhat more general and is used by STREAMS-based network code.

Without having looked into it in detail, I suspect that either of these
libraries could for the most part be emulated in terms of the other.

>We would like to create a "Virtual network runtime library", that would allow
>application programs to interface to any kind of network.

Good luck; there are too many oddball networks in existence.

One thing you might consider is to make provisions to use whatever
user-level facilities each operating system has.  For example, in a
current project, in order to run a particular application that massages
a data file, I map the name of the data object to an information file
that tells me what command to use to fire up a remotely-executing slave
process, then I just pipe stuff to and fro independently of the
underlying network implementation.  Works great.