Why are you casting to sockaddr_in/6? The whole point of that system is that you can just pass around the sockaddr* without even needing to have a definition fo

Why are you casting to sockaddr_in/6? The whole point of that system is that you can just pass around the sockaddr* without even needing to have a definition for sockaddr_in or sockaddr_in6. All of the socket API functions accept sockaddr*, and if you need to get the IP or port out then you use getnameinfo(), which also takes sockaddr*. There should be little reason to ever cast to either of those types in normal use. (I can think of one or two cases where you might, but they're not common.) Having to deal with the separate socklen_t is mildly annoying, but you can just make a little struct that holds both.