This is a library aiming to provide a reasonable, reliable and cross-platform sockets interface for C++.

As you may know, networking is kind of a pain as most code using raw sockets can be horribly difficult to port to other systems. This library provides a simple abstraction over the raw sockets so that you can compile the same code for different operating systems with ease.

This library is simple enough that it isn't really as much of a PIT to use as some other, more complex ones, but is still useful enough IMO.

When building FOR windows, you need to have mingw installed, as the build system relies heavily on it, and you may have to set the COMPILER environment variable if your mingw executable has a different name.

Things get just slightly more complicated when building ON windows. For one, you need a linux-style environment, either through WSL or Cygwin (or whatever other eldritch horror you decide to make a contract with) and you need to use mingw (or something compatible) as a compiler.

Things are pretty standard on linux; just include the socket.hpp header file in any code you want to use the library in (either locally, or by installing the headers to a system directory) and then link with the library (again either locally or by installing) when compiling your code. Everything should just work.

On windows, on top of the steps for linux, you also have to link your code with winsock2. (for mingw, this is done by adding the -lws2_32 flag)

Otherwise, the steps are plenty similar to Linux.