Sokett

Sokett is a cross-platform software library designed to simplify socket-based network programming. It provides an abstraction layer over operating system sockets to support asynchronous, event-driven communication with a uniform API across languages and platforms. The project emphasizes a small, predictable core and bindings for C, Python, JavaScript, and Rust, enabling use in servers, clients, and embedded contexts.

Sokett was created by the Sokett Project and first released in 2020 as an open-source project under the MIT license. Development is community-driven, with contributions from individual developers and small organizations. The library has seen periodic major releases and is used in demonstration projects and some experimental systems.

Its core features include non-blocking I/O, an event loop, lightweight task scheduling, and automatic reconciliation of connection state. It supports TCP and UDP transports, TLS/SSL encryption, and optional multiplexing of logical channels over a single physical connection. The API aims to minimize boilerplate, provide error handling, and offer pluggable transports for different platforms. Bindings target common runtimes and environments, and a simple test suite accompanies releases.

The architecture comprises a core runtime that handles event dispatch and state machines, a transport layer for the actual sockets, and a security layer for encryption and certificate handling. A language-binding layer exposes the API to host languages, while platform adapters ensure compatibility with Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

Usage scenarios include real-time multiplayer prototypes, IoT gateways, and microservice backends. Reviewers note Sokett's clear design and ease of use for simple tasks, while stating that its ecosystem and performance characteristics are less mature than those of longer-established socket libraries. See also TCP, UDP, TLS/SSL, and WebSocket.