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Is there any benefit to using windows winsock API functions over BSD style socket functions?

Are there any advantages in Windows for using Winsock WSA functions over BSD style?

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The most significant difference is the availability of the asynchronous event APIs in Winsock.

With Berkeley sockets, every time you read

or write

, your application will "block" until the network is ready, which can render your application unresponsive (unless network I / O is being processed on another thread).



With the asynchronous interface, you can provide a callback function to be called as part of the normal Windows message loop each time data is received or when the transmit buffer is empty.

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Only if you plan on deploying a legacy platform like Windows 95, or there is something about the winsock API that you absolutely can't live with and you don't want to rollback (<- dubious).



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If you are developing the BSD paradigm, your code can run on other platforms with fewer porting operations. If you assume that your networking library will support asynchronous I / O (as Alnitak mentions), you have to do a lot more work if it gets out of your way.

Of course, if you're sure you'll never leave Microsoft's warm chest, feel free to drive into town.

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Regarding Alnitak's answer, I agree - I would add that you don't need to use a message loop to use asynchronous operations on sockets. Using I / O completion ports is a very scalable way to create a high performance network application.

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