In OTP 22 we introduced the new experimental socket API. The idea behind this API is to have a stable intermediary API that can be used to create features that are not part of the higher-level gen_* APIs. We have now come one step further in our plan to replace the inet driver by making it possible to use the gen_tcp API with socket as an optional back-end. To make it easy to test with existing code using gen_tcp a new option {inet_backend, socket | inet} can be used to select the socket implementation instead of the default inet implementation.