API using sockaddr_storage

Question

I\'m trying to do some IP agnostic coding and as suggested by various sources I tried to use sockaddr_storage. However all the API calls (getaddrinfo, getnameinfo) still dep

Answer 1

I don't generally see the need for struct sockaddr_storage. It's purpose is to allocate enough space for the sockaddr structure of any given protocol, but how often do you need to do that in IP-version-agnostic code? Generally you call getaddrinfo() and it gives you a bunch of struct sockaddr *s, and you don't care whether they're sockaddr_in or sockaddr_in6, you just pass them along as-is to bind() and connect() (no casting required).

In typical client/server code, the main place I can think of where struct sockaddr_storage is useful is to reserve space for the second parameter to accept(). In this case I agree it's ugly to have to cast it to struct sockaddr * once for accept() and again for getnameinfo(). But I can't see a way around those casts. This is C. Structure inheritance always involves lots of casts.