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Rationale

Most programs interact with the outside world in some way, whether it be via a file, a network, a serial cable, or the console. Sometimes, as is the case with networking, individual I/O operations can take a long time to complete. This poses particular challenges to application development.

Boost.Asio provides the tools to manage these long running operations, without requiring programs to use concurrency models based on threads and explicit locking.

The Boost.Asio library is intended for programmers using C++ for systems programming, where access to operating system functionality such as networking is often required. In particular, Boost.Asio addresses the following goals:

Although Boost.Asio started life focused primarily on networking, its concepts of asynchronous I/O have been extended to include other operating system resources such as serial ports, file descriptors, and so on.


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