Hi Karl, Adam,

Well I think pipes and sockets seem certainly the most
practical cross-platform IPC mechanisms...

Pipes seems to have less difference in that only perhaps
a few #ifdef WIN32 are required, if any, in a cross-compile...

Sockets definitely does require a number of #ifdef WIN32,
but not really excessive... many can be handled as MACROS...
and the cross-porting has been done MANY times... in lots
and lots of libraries, apps, utilities, so is sort of very
mature... getting easy even...

But reading up a little on MSDN, and remembering, the
following IPC mechanisms are available in Windows, but
for sure some are **WINDOWS ONLY**!

1. Clipboard/DDE - can agree a format then do copy/paste
2. COM - OLE manage compound document interface
3. Data Copy - Using Windows messaging - WM_COPYDATA
4. RPC - have only ever used it over sockets...
5. File Mapping or shared memory mapping - just put data
6. Pipes and Sockets - are cross-platform...

Not sure which of these would fit "domain sockets", but maybe
I missed something else available... having coded and used
most of them, in various apps, at various time, I am not sure
which I would choose as the most 'generic' to Windows...

I am sure unix has some form of shared memory mapping (5)... just
copy a data block using a simple memory pointer would probably be
the fastest... but requires that the partner be monitoring that
space, polling... and what about thread safety? and maybe needs
some/many #ifdef to account for the differences...

But as Karl mentions he has already shown 6. Pipes and Sockets
both work... with no porting issues that I know of...

Concerning sockets, over the years I have collected some tcp,
udp samples, and this is where I added and tested Karl's
socket.c - and pushed them all to my 'new' tcp-tests repo -

https://github.com/geoffmcl/tcp-tests

See src/ebsocket.c... compiles without even a warning both
in WIN32 and UNIX... still to do a WIN64 compile... and
maybe a MinGW compile... sockets are fun ;=)) and really
now quite an old technology that has not been replaced...

Regards,
Geoff.

PS: I have now 'subscibed' to the dev list... so should
be no need to cc me...