I don't think this is true. When it comes to copying bytes from a buffer supplied from the network, there isn't a wrapper/manager class that can do this for you

I don't think this is true. When it comes to copying bytes from a buffer supplied from the network, there isn't a wrapper/manager class that can do this for you. Somewhere down the pipeline some piece of code has to copy the unstructured, variable length byte stream into a manageable data structure. C++ does not give any way to do this beyond the mechanisms available in C.