ACE or the Adaptive Communication Environment is a C++, open source, distributed systems, platform abstraction layer. Iit was developed by teams at UC Irvine, Washingtion University in St. Louis and now at Vanderbilt. It spans platforms from Windows, through Unix like OSs like Linux, all the way to RTOSs such as VxWorks, LynxOS, GH Integrity, QNX, RT Linux etc.

ACE offers the C++ developers best of class patterns for solutions to complex network programming problems.

ACE has been in use for over 12 years. It is widely used in mission critical large scale systems and has large community. It is also popular with real-time and embedded systems developers.

ACE enables portable, type safe C++ code to get socket level performance.