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copied!<p>If you're going to use C++, I second "the_mandrill" above by strongly recommending you look at ASIO in Boost - that is a great way to write the code once and support both platforms.</p> <p>As to whether or not C++ is the right language is rather more subjective. My personal feelings are that if you need to ask, odds on, it's not the best approach.</p> <p>Reasons for selecting C++ to implement networking code are:</p> <ul> <li>Possible to achieve very low latencies and high throughput with very carefully designed and implemented code.</li> <li>Possible to take explicit control of memory management - avoiding variations in performance associated with garbage collection.</li> <li>Potential for tight integration of networking code in-process with other native libraries.</li> <li>Potential to build small components suitable for deployment in resource constrained environments.</li> <li>Low level access to C socket API exposes features such as socket options to use protocols beyond vanilla TCP/IP and UDP.</li> </ul> <p>Reasons for avoiding C++ are:</p> <ul> <li>Lower productivity in developing code compared with higher-level languages (e.g. Java/C#/Python etc. etc.)</li> <li>Greater potential for significant implementation errors (pointer-abuse etc.)</li> <li>Additional effort required to verify code compiles on each platform.</li> </ul> <p>Alternatives you might consider include:</p> <ul> <li>Python... directly using low level socket support or high-level Twisted library. Rapid development using convenient high-level idioms and minimal porting effort. Biggest disadvantage - poor support to exploit multiple processor cores for high-throughput systems.</li> <li>Ruby(socket)/Perl(IO::Socket)... High level languages which might be particularly suited if the communicated information is represented as text strings.</li> <li>Java... garbage collection simplifies memory management; wide range of existing libraries.</li> <li>CLR languages (C# etc.) also garbage collected - like Java... WCF is an effective framework within which bespoke protocols can be developed... which may prove useful.</li> </ul> <p>You also asked: "<em>I understand that I'll have to use Microsoft's Visual C++ library, as it seems as though it is hard to utilize C++ code from C#; is this true?</em>"</p> <p>You can avoid Visual C++ libraries entirely - either by developing using a language other than C++, or using an alternate C++ compiler - for example Cygwin or MinGW offer G++... though I'd recommend using Visual C++ to build C and C++ code for Windows.</p> <p>It's not hard to use C++ code from C# - though I don't recommend it as an approach.. it's likely overly complicated. Visual C++ can (optionally) compile "Managed Code" from C++ source (there are a few syntax extensions to grasp and there's a slightly different syntax for interoperation using Mono rather than Visual C++, but these are not major issues IMHO.) These CLR objects interact directly with C# objects and can be linked together into a single assembly without issue. It's also easy to access native DLLs (potentially written using C++ for the native architecture) using Pinvoke. All this is somewhat irrelevant, however, as the .Net framework has good support for low level networking (similar to that provided by Winsock[2]) in system.net - this provides a convenient C#-oriented interface to similar facilities, and will likely provide a more convenient API to develop against if using C# (or VB.Net or any of the other CLR languages.)</p>

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