Sockets in MinGW

Question

I was just trying to build netcat in MSYS using MinGW and realized that MinGW never really ported all of the BSD socket stuff to Windows (eg sys/socket.h). I know you can use Windows Sockets in MinGW, but why did they never make a Windows port of the BSD sockets? I noticed quite a few programs using #ifdef's to workaround the issue. Is there a Windows port of the BSD sockets somewhere that can be used instead?

Here are the errors when doing a make for netcat in MSYS:

gcc -DLOCALEDIR=\"\/usr/local/share/locale\" -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -g -O2 -Wall -c `test -f 'core.c' || echo './'`core.c
In file included from core.c:29:
netcat.h:38:24: sys/socket.h: No such file or directory
netcat.h:39:63: sys/uio.h: No such file or directory
netcat.h:41:24: netinet/in.h: No such file or directory
netcat.h:42:55: arpa/inet.h: No such file or directory

There are no #ifdef's for MinGW. Is there a library/package I can add to MSYS to make everything compile without errors?

Note: You can download netcat here and browse the CVS repo here

Answer 1

As ChrisW said, Winsock2 is a port of BSD sockets. Which part of winsock are you trying to use which differs from BSD sockets ? (other than the WSAStartup and WSACleanup)

Answer 2

MingWin is minimalist, and that is the most important aspect of it. Because it makes it easier to understand, at the end it is the developer's responsibility to write the application. MingWin only makes things easier but does no magic in turing nix apps to windows.

Answer 3

WinSock and WinSock2 have different function names from the BSD Sockets. If I wish to write cross-platform applications, then I have code a lot of work-arounds just to keep Microsoft happy.

It would be so much easier if there were special "socket.h" and "socket.c" files included with MinGW that simply translated stuff by calling the respective WinSock2 counter-parts.

I'm just starting to learn C programming, so I'm unable to do this myself, but I'm surprised that nobody seems to have even attempted this so far.