Crow VS µWebSockets

I'm investigating using C++ to build a REST server, and would love to know of people's experiences with Crow-- or whether they would recommend something else as a "medium-level" abstraction C++ web server. As background, I started off experimenting with Python/FastAPI, which is great, but there is too much friction to translate from pybind11-exported C++ objects to the format that FastAPI expects, and, of course, there are inherent performance limitations using Python, which could impact scaling up if the project were to be successful.

How about Crow?

https://github.com/CrowCpp/Crow is super easy to use

I recommend Crow, it's a web framework that supports HTTP and Websockets. It's a bit larger than being only there to just let you compose or decode a packet. But I'm pretty sure everything you mentioned is there already :)

It's also very useful to get to grips with using some popular libraries. Some might be ones that you'll find yourself using everywhere (e.g. fmt, spdlog, catch2), and some that have more specific usage, but are good to try out and explore what C++ can do in a ridiculously easy-to-use manner (e.g. crow, Dear ImGui). Make some toy projects that use some of these and you'll learn a lot.

I've been working on Crow for quite a while now, it's a pretty cool framework IMO.

Crow

You can also consider https://crowcpp.org/.

They use (uWebSockets)[https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets], which was written in C++, but has an interface to use in NodeJS. It's been really performant for me in my simple tests compared to other popular websocket libs that slow down fairly quickly.

µWebSockets, pronounced as "microWebSocket”, is a WebSocket library written in C++ and has Node.js bindings. Its design focuses on being efficient and scalable, making it ideal for applications that require high concurrency and low latency.

You can do that with any single threaded library that leaves threading to you. Like for example https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets

Websockets are also pretty valuable for updating the page in real time, there are servers in many languages. I'm a big fan of https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets which is C++ but also has JS bindings to use with Node.js.

Can you include uWebsockets? https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets

μWebSockets Génial, rapide, peut transformer l’eau en vin. Nécessite C++17.

Not exaclty -- it looks like it's pretty overkill for my needs

I'm looking for something more like websocketpp[0], or even just grpc without a requisite proxy. uWebsockets looks really promising, being header only, but in the fine print requires a runtime library. unfortunately, none of that ecosystem seems to use cmake, making integrating it that much more of a pain.

why use cpp for this, I'm sure some HNer will ask. the ray tracer itself is using cuda, that's why. I've also debated

- running it as a grpc server and having some proxy in a more web-accessible language

- creating python bindings and using python to make a websocket/http server for it

neither of those are out of the question, but they're not my first choices, because I'd like to keep the build & execution simple. introducing dependencies, especially other executables, is in conflict with that.

i don't need anything particularly scalable -- a threaded implementation, or one using select() would be fine, if not preferable.

[0] https://docs.websocketpp.org/

[1] https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets

Really cool i also made and CAPI for using WebSocket in C, https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets/tree/master/capi

I will take a deep look on your project thanks for sharing!

We discover a really fast, small, and well maintained C++ Library called uNetworking/uWebSockets, but no C API available, so we create and adapt the full C API from uNetworking/uWebSockets and will integrate libuv powered fetch and file IO, this same C API is used by Bun