Inheritance from C struct

Hello all

I wanted to create my own socket classes for future network programming in C++ and got disuaded shortly after, now I'm returning to it after solving a few problems. I do have one question to ask whilst carrying on.
I am trying to add a few features to give programming flexibility without re-inventing the wheel so to speak.
I was wondering if I could duplicate the sockaddr_in struct into a class in C++ and use it or can I derive classes that inherit from the struct itself. I once read somewhere that structs and classes were similar.

Yes, the main difference between a class and a struct is that a class by default has private members, struct has global members.

However, beware that a struct that has a constructor, copy-function or destructor, or virtual functions, is no longer considered "plain old data", which in turn means that some of the behaviour changes - particularly the reliance on the internal datastructure itself is now broken, because the compiler may insert "hidden" bits in the struct itself, which "breaks" the original data structure.

What you could do is hide a sockaddr_in inside your class, and produce "extraction functions" that provide a sockaddr_in as part of the result from some functions.

--
Mats

While it is perfectly allowable to derive from a struct I would advise against it for the reasons matsp mentioned and also because normally when other programmer's see struct they expect it to be for a header or data block. Using struct to represent a class, while perfectly valid from a language standpoint, is going to make your card hard to follow later and perhaps hard to maintain. In my book using a struct as a class is nearly the same as overriding an operator to do something completely different than what the operator normally does. For instance overriding the + operator to write out a file or something.

You could create a class that uses the struct to perform its duties which is a perfectly valid design decision.

Thank you both very much for your advise.

Ok I'm back to having problems in Dev cpp with my socket programming code.
I'm almost 100% certain it's to do with the code structure:

Code:

---

class sockID{
private:
      string sockName, address;
      struct sockaddr_in cSock;
      unsigned short int *port;

public:
      //the GET functions
      string getSockName() {return sockName; }
      string getSockAddress () {return address;}
      int getPort () {return (int) port;}

    //constructors
      sockID(string s_address, unsigned short int s_Port);
      sockID(string s_Name, string s_address, unsigned short int s_Port);
};

// Class constructors
sockID::sockID(string s_Name, string s_address, unsigned short int s_Port) {
                                                   
                  port = &cSock.sin_port;
          sockName = s_Name;
         
          cSock.sin_family = AF_INET;
                  cSock.sin_port = s_Port; // short, network byte order  MAY NOT WORK
                  cSock.sin_addr.s_addr = inet_addr( s_address.c_str() );
                //inet_aton(s_address.c_str(), &(cSock.sin_addr)); <== not valid in windows
                  memset(cSock.sin_zero, '\0', sizeof cSock.sin_zero);

---

and then

Code:

---

int main() {
//WSADATA wsaData; // if this doesn't work
WSAData wsaData; // then try this instead
if (WSAStartup(MAKEWORD(1, 1), &wsaData) != 0) {
fprintf(stderr, "WSAStartup failed.\n");
exit(1);
}

rest of main..

---

everything's in one file at the moment because this is a skeleton I'm building so I'd like to get it working before I tidy everything up into files.
Basically I'm still getting the same: [Linker error] undefined reference to `WSAStartup@8' and [Linker error] undefined reference to `inet_addr@4' errors in dev cpp

when I compile the file alone I get no errors whatsoever but when I compile the project it throws up these errors.
My best guess is that maybe it's because I'm using those functions before the windows sockets initialisation routine.

You still need to link with the winsock library.

To the project options (alt-p), click on the parameters tab, then add the library libws2_32.a.

Thank you very much you are almost the God of C :)