Assignment 1: Basic Message Processing

This first assignment is meant as a warm-up exercise to get reacquainted with socket programming. You must implement an IRC server that implements the NICK and USER messages only well enough to perform a single user registration as shown in Example IRC Communications.

More specifically, your solution to this assignment should meet the following requirements:

• (A) You must send the RPL_WELCOME only after the NICK and USER messages have been received.

• (B) You must take into account that you may get more or less than one full message when you read from a socket. You may not solve this problem by reading one character at a time from the socket.

• (C) Your solution must parse the nick and username from the NICK and USER messages, and compose the correct RPL_WELCOME reply. You must use the provided message.c module for this.

Although not required for this assignment, you should take into account that subsequent assignments will involve adding support for additional messages and replies. So, while it is possible to implement your solution entirely inside the chirc_run function in main.c, you should start looking at the handlers.c module, which provides a more robust mechanism for dispatching messages to handler functions that will process them.

That said, if your solution to this assignment takes some shortcuts by assuming that you will only be dealing with the NICK and USER messages and the RPL_WELCOME reply, you will not be penalized for it.

Your server must be implemented in C, and must use sockets. There should be no need for you to use pthreads at this point.