N-party client-to-client communication using C++ and Boost::Asio

Question

I've been playing around with Boost::Asio and checking out it's capability when it comes to n independent users collaborating to compute a function on shared inputs.

At one point I need to get each user to send to (resp. receive from) all the other users some data.

I guess effectively I'm looking for "active" establishment by each user opposed to the common client-server examples seen all over the internet.

I've got working code that allows a user to send data to another user. I'm having trouble seeing how I should get all users to be simultaneously sending and receiving from each other. I also can't seem to generalise multiple async_connects at once.

Are there any suggestions as to how this sort of protocol should be implemented? Should I be looking at using threads to manage both sending and receiving?

Answer 1

If you on Unix-based OS, such as Linux, I would start with much less complex solution using C programming language (or C++ if you need that), but without using Boost library. Just use plain old select syscall instead. See manpage and tutorial manpage .

Only after that I'd switch to something fancy like Boost .

See also this tutorial about BSD sockets programming.