PTypes is a C++ Portable Types Library. It offers the following features:

* Threads and synchronization objects along with message queues solve 
   the vital problem of diversity of the threading API's on different
   platforms.
* IP socket classes and utilities provide complete IP-based framework
   for both client-side and server-side programming. They can be
   combined with PTypes multithreading.
* Dynamic strings, variants, character sets, date/time type and various 
   kinds of dynamic and associative arrays: Delphi programmers will find
   them very similar to the ones in their favorite language.
* Streaming interfaces provide buffered I/O with simple and powerful text
   parsing methods. A strictly defined syntax for the given text format
   or a formal language can be represented by calls to PTypes token
   extraction methods. The unified streaming interface is applicable to
   files, named pipes and network sockets.
* Special thread class with enhanced functionality called unit. Units have
   their own main() and input/output 'plugs'; they can be connected to each
   other within one application to form pipes, like processes in the Unix shell.
* Finally, everything above is portable: all platform-dependent details
   are hidden inside.

WWW: http://ptypes.sourceforge.net/