Dave Coombs - Net Integration Technologies, Inc.

WvStreams: An Easier Way to World Domination

WvStreams is an open-source C++ networking library developed over the last few years with the following major goal: make coding easy, without sacrificing performance. Really.

How easy? With WvStreams, it took one weekend to write Tunnel Vision, a simple, secure VPN. With WvStreams, it took *one evening* to write Retchmail, the world's fastest and smartest POP3 mail retriever. These projects, and WvStreams, and our other open-source projects, are available at http://open.nit.ca/ for your enjoyment.

Our rule is: Any amount of code ugliness is okay if it removes more ugliness than it adds. The internal parts of WvStreams are not for the faint of heart, but the code that *uses* the library ends up being very clean, easy to write, easy to understand, and (yes) still very fast.

This presentation will describe what areas of your life WvStreams can improve, by making it very easy to do complex but common things, such as TCP streams, encoders, buffers, crypto, lists and tables, task switching, Gtk and Qt integration, and other goodies. I will also describe future plans for WvStreams, and how these will help even more.

I will then present spine-tingling examples that do crazy, ordinarily complicated things, using almost no lines of code, including a cheesy, SSL-enabled replacement for IRC that runs on both Linux and Windows.

Paper

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