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 -

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...