| Areas | Networking |
| Good if student knows | Socket APIs for Unix and Windows |
| Priority | Medium |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Benefits to the student | Learns about network programming and portable coding |
| Benefits to Tcl | A single code base for [socket] |
| Mentor | Reinhard Max |
For historical reasons Tcl has separate implementations for networking code under Windows and Unix although both socket APIs are quite similar and so large parts of the two implementations are almost identical already.
The goal of this project would be to examine the two OS APIs for similarities and differences and find a way to merge the two code bases within the Tcl core (win/tclWinSock.c and unix/tclUnixSock.c) into the generic layer generic/tclSocketIO.c.