PcapPlusPlus: a multiplatform C++ network sniffing and packet crafting library (opens in new tab)

(seladb.github.io)

61 pointsseladb8y ago4 comments

4 comments

4 comments · 2 top-level

nunez8y ago· 2 in thread

Wow. This was literally my senior design project 8 years ago. I started writing a wrapper library in C++ with a few colleagues. It's harder than people without experience in this sort of thing realize!

lfowles8y ago

There have been some good CPPCon talks on the subject of wrapping C libraries.

CppCon 2014: Lisa Lippincott "How to call C libraries from C++" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZO0V4Prefc - This is the first one that comes to mind

hackits8y ago

Give credit to Lisa for the presentation. Although she starts with the premise that don't build a OOP over a C API instead use rules instead! Although by the end of the presentation I have to question her recommendations and solution to the problem. Namely her final result is harder to read and understand than the original C code she showed at the start of the presentation.

I would have to question the whole C++ language where still to this day they're still talking about communicating with C API from the C++ layers. The STL/BOOST library are a step in the right direction but also a step back with the language that in a nightmare to work with unless you stick a very small sub-set of the language.

jacobparker8y ago

I've used libtins (a C++ wrapper on libpcap) for its high-level interface before and enjoyed it. Some benchmarks in the README indicate this library has marginal-to-significantly better performance: https://github.com/seladb/PcapPlusPlus

Comparing to http://libtins.github.io/benchmark/ at a glance it looks reasonable - libcrafter is a lot slower than both, and libpcap is often much faster. (scapy (Python) is really, really slow.)

Personally, if I was using libtins and really needed more perf I'd strongly consider just using libpcap directly. But the high-level APIs are really handy.

I don't have anything substantive to say about PcapPlusPlus but I'll check it out :)

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