I am thinking of creating a multi-platform portable C++ server-client application. Is it even possible while using only standard libraries? If no, what other libraries are there?

Are there any improvements in this direction in C++11x? Like for threads, now we have std::threads.

To make it more clear.. I want something like boost::thread, which provides multiplatform portable multithreading, for networking.

And why C++ doesn't have libraries(standard) for such basic things like networking?

**Update**: Comparing to Python, which has everything (almost) built in to it... why not in C++?