I'm trying to write an application that can simply switch between using local stream sockets and tcp stream sockets. I successfully implemented this behavior with BSD sockets in Linux, but it seems the class hierarchy in boost::asio makes this behavior awkward, since asio::basic_socket_acceptor template requires a protocol type, but there is so base class for protocols. I'm wondering if there is a reason for this or if it could possibly be changed? Basically, I have a client/server library for distributed processing, which in some cases, I wish to run using local sockets and other times run using TCP sockets. I was hoping Boost Asio could make the solution a little more elegant/clean, but at the moment I can't find an elegant manner to do this. I'd be glad to do all the work for this, provided some guidance, but I basically don't want to build my application on a custom version of boost::asio, which won't improve with the main version. So if this can't be changed, I just won't use asio, but if it can, I'll go ahead and take the time to implement the changes