sap_network

Cross-platform C++20 networking library providing TCP, UDP, and TLS sockets with a uniform interface enforced by a C++20 concept. Error handling uses stl::result<T> from sap_core — no exceptions.

Part of the Sapfire library ecosystem.

What's inside

Sockets

• TCPSocket — stream socket. bind, listen, connect, accept, send, recv, close. Configurable send/recv timeouts.
• UDPSocket — datagram socket.
• TLSSocket — TLS 1.2/1.3 over TCP via OpenSSL. Supports both client and server roles, ALPN negotiation, post-handshake cipher/protocol/certificate introspection.

Socket concept

template<typename T>
concept Socket = requires(T s, stl::span<const stl::byte> data, stl::span<stl::byte> buf) {
    { s.send(data) } -> std::same_as<stl::result<size_t>>;
    { s.recv(buf)  } -> std::same_as<stl::result<size_t>>;
    { s.close()    } -> std::same_as<void>;
    { s.valid()    } -> std::same_as<bool>;
};

Both TCPSocket and TLSSocket satisfy Socket, verified with static_assert at compile time.

Platform abstraction

platform.h normalises socket handles and errno across Windows (WinSock2) and POSIX. All platform differences are isolated to *_windows.cpp / *_posix.cpp translation units.

TLS design

TLSSocket has three internal states encoded in a std::variant<TlsClientConfig, TlsServerConfig, TlsAcceptedConfig>:

• Client — connect() performs TCP connect + TLS handshake + certificate verification.
• Server — bind() / listen() / accept() accept incoming TCP connections and complete the TLS handshake.
• Accepted — returned from accept(), ready for send() / recv().

The config variant is declared before the TCPSocket member — member initialisation order is load-bearing here since the TCP socket constructor reads from the active variant.

Post-handshake you can query negotiated_protocol() (ALPN result), negotiated_cipher(), negotiated_tls_version(), peer_cert_subject(), and peer_cert_issuer().

Build

Requires CMake 3.20+, C++20, OpenSSL, and sap_core.

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build
ctest --test-dir build

Usage example

#include <sap_network/tcp_socket.h>

sap::network::TCPSocket sock{SocketConfig{.host = "127.0.0.1", .port = 8080}};
if (!sock.connect())
    return;

std::array<std::byte, 1024> buf;
auto result = sock.recv(buf);
if (!result)
    std::println("recv error: {}", result.error());
else
    std::println("received {} bytes", result.value());

#include <sap_network/tls_socket.h>

// TLS client
sap::network::TLSSocket tls{TlsClientConfig{.host = "example.com", .port = 443}};
if (!tls.connect()) {
    std::println("handshake failed: {}", tls.handshake_error());
    return;
}
std::println("cipher: {}", tls.negotiated_cipher());