The project wants to provide a portable TCP/IP (and later on maybe UDP) socket interface for as many Common Lisp implementations as possible, while keeping the abstraction and portability layer as thin as possible.
Because trivial-sockets has been declared dead and its author has said he will declare usocket its successor if there is a zero effort path of migration, I'm also working on trivial-usocket which is supposed to be a sub-optimal, but zero effort migration from trivial-sockets.
If your lisp isn't mentioned in the list below, please feel free to submit a request for it at the mailing list mentioned below.
Since usocket is effectively the succesor to trivial-sockets, see the feature comparison with trivial-sockets in order to find out which one you should use.
After starting the project, many others turned out to have worked on something alike, many times as part of a broader project or library. Some of them were known at the start of this project, others have been conceived after the usocket project already started. Not all of them have exactly the same portability goal.
See the Implementation comparison page for a comparison of the portability of other libaries and how that relates to usocket.
See the documentation page for the API description.
Currently these implementations are supported:
This project has started Januari 2006. There isn't much of a community yet, though I'd like there to be one. So, you're invited to join the mailing list, announce yourself and even join the effort!
Development discussion takes place on usocket-devel@common-lisp.net.
Project tracking happens in the project's Trac setup. Please take note of the guidelines before entering a bug or enhancement request into the database.
Development will at least follow the steps outlined below. Yet to be determined is whether the currently mentioned steps will be enough to release version 1.0. Possibly, UDP sockets remain to be addressed before doing 1.0; that will depend on your reactions :-)
The targeted implementations listed in the status table below are not a final list: others can be added if/when the need or interest arrises.
Active development is taking place in the Subversion repository. To be kept up to date, please subscribe to the commit message mailing list. To use the latest development version, make sure you have Subversion installed and execute this command:
$ svn checkout svn://common-lisp.net/project/usocket/svn/usocket/trunk usocket-svn
Please send patches, bug reports and suggestions to the development mailing list address given above. The table below indicates the current state of development.
| Major steps | Socket implementations | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minor steps | SBCL | CMUCL | ABCL | clisp | Allegro | LispWorks | OpenMCL | ECL | Scieneer | |
| Minimal active sockets support
at the same level as provided by
trivial-sockets. (Meaning streamed tcp traffic on connected sockets.) |
Investigate interfaces provided. | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE |
| Identify socket errors generated. | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | |
| Implement active socket support. | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | |
| Implement remapping of implementation defined errors. | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | |
| Implementation test-suite status | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | |
| Add functions to retrieve socket properties: Local and remote IP address and port. |
Investigate interfaces provided | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE |
| Implement it. | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | |
| Implementation test-suite status | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | |
| Add support for passive (connection-accepting/server) sockets. | Investigate interfaces provided | WIP | WIP | WIP | WIP | WIP | WIP | WIP | WIP | WIP |
| Implement api calls listen and accept | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | |
| Implement api calls get- and setsockopt (or equivalent). | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | |
| Implement efficient waiting for multiple sockets in one function call (select() like behaviour). | Investigate interfaces provided | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | done | DONE | DONE | DONE |
| Implement wait-for-input api. | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | DONE | done | DONE | DONE | DONE | |
| Implement more uncommon api calls for tcp streams. | send, recv | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO |
| shutdown | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | |
| Implement udp socket support. | Investigate API's provided | WIP | WIP | WIP | WIP | WIP | WIP | WIP | WIP | WIP |
| Build on top of that (or custom ffi). | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | TODO | |
The interfaces currently published in the :export part of the package definition are guaranteed to stay compatible for the entire 0.x lifecycle. Extention in a backward compatible way is ofcourse valid, as is the addition of new interface functions.
Releases are uploaded to the releases/ directory. You can find short descriptions in the table below:
| Date | Release | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Jun 28, 2008 | 0.3.7 | Fix of OpenMCL (Closure CL) backend. |
| Jun 21, 2008 | 0.3.6 | Code fixups based on advice from the ECL and OpenMCL maintainers. New exported symbols: WITH-MAPPED-CONDITIONS, NS-CONDITION, NS-ERROR, NS-UNKNOWN-ERROR and NS-UNKNOWN-CONDITION. |
| Jul 25, 2007 | 0.3.4 | Fix clisp get-host-name, multiple ECL fixes. |
| Jun 05, 2007 | 0.3.3 | Fix where host resolution routine was unable to resolve would return NIL instead of erroring. |
| Mar 04, 2007 | 0.3.2 | Fixes for many backends related to closing sockets. LispWorks fix for broken server sockets. API guarantee adjustments in preparation of porting Drakma. |
| Feb 28, 2007 | 0.3.1 | fixed with-server-socket; prevent creation of invalid sockets; 2 more convenience macros. |
| Feb 26, 2007 | re-release | Re-release of 0.2.3, 0.2.4, 0.2.5 and 0.3.0 tarballs because the originals included Subversion administration areas. |
| Jan 21, 2007 | 0.3.0 | Server sockets |
| Jan 19, 2007 | 0.2.5 | Allegro compilation fix. |
| Jan 17, 2007 | 0.2.4 | Various fixes for CMUCL, OpenMCL, Allegro and LispWorks. |
| Jan 04, 2007 | 0.2.3 | Add :element-type support to support stacking flexi-streams on socket streams for portable :external-format support. |
| Jan 03, 2007 | 0.2.2 | Add ECL support and a small SBCL bugfix. |
| Dec 21, 2006 | 0.2.1 | Remove 'open-stream' interface which is supposed to be provided by the 'trivial-usocket' package. |
| Dec 18, 2006 | 0.2.0 | Add support for Scieneer Common Lisp, fix issue #6 and API preparation for server side sockets (not in this release) |
| Feb 13, 2006 | 0.1.0 | Initial release |
Long ago the project was conceived and started by Erik Enge in an attempt to factor out all implementation specific sockets code from cl-irc. This 'long ago' must have been way before 2003 when I entered the cl-irc project.
In january 2006, Erik Huelsmann found Erik Enge willing to donate the code he had still laying around to restart the project. The restart took place at the 27th of january when the old code was imported into the public repository.