Can you post the link for synapse here? Is it thread safe?

I have to admit I have played with SDL_Net, my main reason for avoiding it at the moment is not because of the extra DLL but becasue of the threading issue, SDL_Net is not Thread Safe. I also wouldn't want to tie anyone wanting to use this library to an external dll, people using DirectX might not want to have to ship SDL_Net and SDL with the app (SDL_Net depends on SDL).

The Threading issue is the biggest issue though. Any high performance networking system needs to be multi threaded.

My personal preference is a library that is pascal based to there are no external dependancies. Indy can be used in a class based mode (I use it like that all the time).

I guess we could start from scratch, but my knowledge of dealing with sockets on the various plattorms (windows, linux, FreeBSD0 is very limited.