"Arkadiy Vertleyb" <vertleyb@hotmail.com> writes:
[snip]
I would expect both asio and a stream API to be layered on top of low-level socket API. This socket API should wrap the platform dependency, but otherwise provide pretty much the same capabilities as current C socket APIs provide, with minimum overhead.
The key problem with that approach is that a `thin' wrapper over the platform APIs is basically useless for implementing asynchronous operations, because asynchronous operations must be implemented in widely different ways on the different platforms. For synchronous operations, it happens to be the case that every platform provides basically the same interface, so at least a portable (but not necessarily very good) interface can be created through only a thin wrapper. -- Jeremy Maitin-Shepard