The purpose of software engineering 
is to manage complexity, not to create it.
Bill Catambay

PTypes (C++ Portable Types Library) is a simple alternative to the STL that includes multithreading and networking. It defines dynamic strings, variants, character sets, lists and other basic data types along with portable thread and synchronization objects, IP sockets and named pipes. Its main `target audience' is developers of complex network daemons, robots or non-visual client/server applications of any kind.

PTypes defines simple and intuitive interfaces and differs from the STL in fairly moderate use of templates. The library is portable across many modern operating systems (currently Linux, MacOS X, SunOS, FreeBSD, HP-UX and Windows). All platform-dependent issues are hidden inside. A simple web server called wshare is included in the package to demonstrate the full power of the library.

And finally, PTypes is open and free.

• Documentation
  The documentation is available both on-line and off-line, i.e. as a part of the downloadable package. You may want to take a look at the Introduction first.

• License
  PTypes is a free library and is covered by a simple license known as "zlib/libpng License". It grants full freedom to use the library for commercial, educational or any other purpose except that you can not change its name and/or the copyright notice and redistribute it as your own work.

• Download PTypes 2.1.1: [primary site]  [from SourceForge.net]
  Although the text files in this package are in UNIX format, they can be displayed and edited in most non-UNIX development environments. No binaries are currently available.

• Subscribe to new releases
  Become a freshmeat.net user and subscribe to the future announcements about PTypes. (freshmeat itself is a huge repository of open-source software.)

• Discussion forum and bug tracking
  Post your questions, comments, feature requests and bug reports through PTypes project management page at SourceForge.net.

The original location of this library is http://www.melikyan.com/ptypes/