ICSC Extended Socket API 1.0 published

For a couple of years now a group of people, myself included, have been working to specify an extended socket API:

The Sockets API Extensions Working Group will specify additions to the standard UNIX (Berkeley) Sockets API that improve the efficiency of network programming. The interfaces will be defined for user-space subsystems and will facilitate protocols such as SDP that bypass the TCP/IP software stack. The interfaces may additionally be adapted for kernel-space subsystems. The primary goal is to preserve the large existing base of sockets applications, enabling portability where reasonable, while providing a natural evolution to more efficient transport protocols in an industry-standard manner. It is intended that these extensions will be submitted to the Austin Group for consideration in a future revision of the Single UNIX Specification.

Yesterday the first revision of the specification was made available. It’s been a long road - I’m very pleased to finally have something out. Thanks are due to the various people that participated in producing the specification, as it really was a team effort.

Now on to completing an implementation and planning the next set of extensions…