Editing Berkeley sockets (section)

==History and implementations==
Berkeley sockets originated with the 4.2BSD [[Unix]] [[operating system]], released in 1983, as a programming interface. Not until 1989, however, could the [[University of California, Berkeley]] release versions of the operating system and networking library free from the licensing constraints of [[AT&T Corporation]]'s proprietary Unix.

All modern operating systems implement a version of the Berkeley socket interface. It became the standard interface for applications running in the [[Internet]]. Even the [[Winsock]] implementation for MS Windows, created by unaffiliated developers, closely follows the standard.

The BSD sockets API is written in the [[C (programming language)|C programming language]]. Most other programming languages provide similar interfaces, typically written as a [[wrapper library]] based on the C API.<ref>E. g. in the [[Ruby (programming language)|Ruby programming language]] [https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/Socket.html class Socket ]</ref>

===BSD and POSIX sockets===
As the Berkeley socket API evolved and ultimately yielded the POSIX socket API,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/contents.html |title=— POSIX.1-2008 specification |publisher=Opengroup.org |access-date=2012-07-26}}</ref> certain functions were deprecated or removed and replaced by others. The POSIX API is also designed to be [[Reentrancy (computing)|reentrant]] and supports IPv6.

{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Action
!BSD
!POSIX
|-
|Conversion from text address to packed address
|inet_aton
|inet_pton
|-
|Conversion from packed address to text address
|inet_ntoa
|inet_ntop
|-
|Forward lookup for host name/service
|gethostbyname, gethostbyaddr, getservbyname, getservbyport
|[[getaddrinfo]]
|-
|Reverse lookup for host name/service
|gethostbyaddr, getservbyport
|[[getnameinfo]]
|}

===Alternatives===
The [[Streams (networking API)|STREAMS]]-based [[Transport Layer Interface]] (TLI) API offers an alternative to the socket API. Many systems that provide the TLI API also provide the Berkeley socket API.

Non-Unix systems often expose the Berkeley socket API with a translation layer to a native networking API. [[Plan 9 from Bell Labs|Plan 9]]<ref>{{cite web|url=http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/net/|title=The Organization of Networks in Plan 9}}</ref> and [[Genode]]<ref>{{cite web|url=https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/17.02#Linux_TCP_IP_stack_as_VFS_plugin|title=Linux TCP/IP stack as VFS plugin}}</ref> use file-system APIs with control files rather than file-descriptors.