Boost.Asio VS NATS

Compare Boost.Asio vs NATS and see what are their differences.

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Boost.Asio NATS
20 104
4,575 14,561
- 2.4%
8.1 9.8
about 8 hours ago 6 days ago
C++ Go
- Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Boost.Asio

Posts with mentions or reviews of Boost.Asio. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-08.
  • How to synchronize access to application data in multithreaded asio?
    3 projects | /r/cpp | 8 Jun 2023
    Indeed looks like it, strand_executor_service.hpp is using a Mutex internally (otherwise it wouldn't make sense to me).
  • Not young programmer wants to find source to liquidate gap in modern C++ knowledge.
    3 projects | /r/cpp | 28 Jan 2023
  • LumoclastFW 10 - Networking System
    2 projects | /r/Lumoclast | 8 Nov 2022
    The ASIO framework can be found at https://think-async.com/Asio/ and the relevant license for its use is included in the GitHub repository in the Vendor/licenses directory.
  • Multiplayer Networking Solutions
    19 projects | /r/gamedev | 6 Oct 2022
    Asio Extracted from the much bigger Boost C++ library, it's apparently a really good networking library. As a bonus it also handles async / threads. Here's a really good video tutorial by OneLoneCoder
  • My experience with C++ 20 coroutines
    7 projects | /r/cpp | 1 Aug 2022
    Yes: https://github.com/chriskohlhoff/asio/blob/master/asio/include/asio/coroutine.hpp
  • Ask HN: What are some examples of elegant software?
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 May 2022
  • The Lisp Curse
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2022
    I like working in C++, after a decade of working in Java, Python, Javascript and Clojure, I find working in C++ (which I learned before these other languages) to be quite fun and pleasant, at least with relatively modern C++.

    I've been, on and off, working on a little toy game engine, for a few years. Its a mix of keeping up with C++ advancements, learning various concepts like physically based rendering, and just the fun of crafting a big project, with no constraints other than my time and ability, no deadlines, no expectation of releasing anything. Its cathartic and enjoyable. I really do enjoy it.

    Last September, I got frustrated with something I was working on in a more serious capacity. It was some server software, it responded to HTTP requests, it accessed third party services over HTTP and Websockets, it talked to a Postgres database. Overall it was an event driven system that transformed data and generated actions that would be applied by talking to third party services. The "real" version was written in Clojure and it worked pretty well. I really like Clojure, so all good.

    But because I was frustrated with some things about how it ran and the resources it took up, I wondered what it would be like if I developed a little lean-and-mean version in C++. So I gave it a try as a side project for a few weeks. I used doctest[1] for testing, immer[2] for Clojure-like immutable data structures, [3] lager for Elm-like application state and logic management, Crow[4] for my HTTP server, ASIO[5] and websocketpp[6] for Websockets, cpp-httplib[7] as a HTTP client and PGFE[8] for Postgres, amongst some other little utility libraries. I also wrote it in a Literate Programming style using Entangled[9], which helped me keep everything well documented and explained.

    For the most part, it worked pretty well. Using immer and lager helped keep the logic safe and to the point. The application started and ran very quickly and used very little cpu or memory. However, as the complexity grew, especially when using template heavy libraries like lager, or dealing with complex things like ASIO, it became very frustrating to deal with errors. Template errors even on clang became incomprehensible and segmentation faults when something wasn't quite right became pretty hard to diagnose. I had neither of these problems working on my game engine, but both became issues on this experiment. After a few weeks, I gave up on it. I do think I could have made it work and definitely could go back and simplify some of the decisions I made to make it more manageable, but ultimately, it was more work than I had free time to dedicate to it.

    So my experience was that, yes, you can write high level application logic for HTTP web backends in C++. You can even use tools like immer or lager to make it feel very functional-programming in style and make the application logic really clean. Its not hard to make it run efficiently both in terms of running time and memory usage, certainly when comparing to Clojure or Python. However, I found that over all, it just wasn't as easy or productive as either of those languages and I spent more time fighting the language deficiencies, even with modern C++, than I do when using Clojure or Python.

    I think I would think very long and hard before seriously considering writing a web backend in C++. If I had the time, I'd love to retry the experiment but using Rust, to see how it compares.

    [1] https://github.com/doctest/doctest

    [2] https://github.com/arximboldi/immer

    [3] https://github.com/arximboldi/lager

    [4] https://github.com/CrowCpp/crow

    [5] https://think-async.com/Asio/

    [6] https://www.zaphoyd.com/projects/websocketpp/

    [7] https://github.com/yhirose/cpp-httplib

    [8] https://github.com/dmitigr/pgfe

    [9] https://entangled.github.io/

  • P2300 (Sender/Receiver) is DEAD in the water for C++23 !!!
    5 projects | /r/cpp | 15 Feb 2022
    When was it? Executors (or proto executors if you want) were a thing in ASIO at least since early 00s - https://github.com/chriskohlhoff/asio/commit/02a2d65e4e8b95edc37b325c254017d23f31c342
  • Can you guys recommend a multiplatform alternative to POSIX sockets?
    3 projects | /r/cpp | 5 Jan 2022
    Take a look at asio (https://think-async.com/Asio/)
  • Boost v1.78.0
    7 projects | /r/cpp | 7 Dec 2021
    As the commit (https://github.com/chriskohlhoff/asio/commit/36440a92eb83da34b7516af2632b119f83b66a35) explains, you can have io_uring to support the new I/O objects (i.e. files), but still using the epoll reactor for the other I/O objects. And that seem to be the only reason why the eventfd is there: you are still using epoll, but with io_uring through the eventfd to support things epoll doesn't support.

NATS

Posts with mentions or reviews of NATS. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-20.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Boost.Asio and NATS you can also consider the following projects:

libuv - Cross-platform asynchronous I/O

libevent - Event notification library

RabbitMQ - Open source RabbitMQ: core server and tier 1 (built-in) plugins

celery - Distributed Task Queue (development branch)

redpanda - Redpanda is a streaming data platform for developers. Kafka API compatible. 10x faster. No ZooKeeper. No JVM!

ZeroMQ - ZeroMQ core engine in C++, implements ZMTP/3.1

Apache ActiveMQ - Mirror of Apache ActiveMQ

nsq - A realtime distributed messaging platform

Apache Kafka - Mirror of Apache Kafka

C++ Actor Framework - An Open Source Implementation of the Actor Model in C++

POCO - The POCO C++ Libraries are powerful cross-platform C++ libraries for building network- and internet-based applications that run on desktop, server, mobile, IoT, and embedded systems.

mosquitto - Eclipse Mosquitto - An open source MQTT broker