jaltext: A Made-From-Scratch Texting System

I wanted to get into network programming, so I decided to make a texting system. To make it more interesting, I decided to make it from scratch.

I picked C++ because I am most familiar with it. It is low-level enough to allow more control over the system, but high-level enough to allow abstraction without too much hassle.

This project only relies on the POSIX C library. No external libraries are used. It is portable to any POSIX-compliant system (e.g. Linux, macOS, BSD, etc.). The POSIX C library is wrapped in a C++ interface.

Demonstration

Here is the demonstration on YouTube.

Features

• Multiple clients can send messages to each other
• Non-blocking I/O

Dependencies

• C++20 (GNU GCC 12.1.0)
• CMake (version 3.22 or above)
• A POSIX-compliant system (e.g. Linux, macOS, BSD, etc.)

Building

• Clone this repository
• cmake -S. -Bbuild
• make -Cbuild
• The executables jaltext_server and jaltext_client in the directory build/ will appear.

Extra

• If you can’t build the project, please make sure the dependencies are correctly applied;
• You can use the -j flag for Make to enable multithreaded compiling (for example, my laptop has 4 cores, so I usually run make -Cbuild -j4).

Project Structure

• src/: Source code of the project implementation
  • jalsock/: The wrapped standalone POSIX C library functions (e.g. send(), recv(), etc.)
  • types/: The wrapper classes for the POSIX C library (e.g. addr_info, sockaddr, etc.)
  • server/: The server implementation
  • client/: The client implementation

Notes

• I could have done better with epoll, but I decided to use select because it is easier to use. I will probably switch to epoll in the future.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.