doctest VS cpp-httplib

I have never used "tools" for unit-tests, only web sites that show the results of the tests or code coverage. For C++ I prefer https://github.com/doctest/doctest but most companies I worked for use Catch2.

Do the README and tutorial not explain it well enough? It's a framework for automated unit testing.

This is, honestly, super easy to get going. Nowadays you have a ton of libraries and more-than-decent build systems. With Meson/CMake and Conan/Vcpkg I can set up a project with testing in 3 minutes. Also, I think that at the end of the day you want your tests to live somewhere else. But if you want to embed them, you also have https://github.com/doctest/doctest.

Write some tests. They can find bugs early and give you confidence that your code works so far. That doesn't have to be anything fancy, e.g. with doctest:

Keep in mind https://github.com/doctest/doctest/issues/554. Also, doctest lacks: - Matchers - Data generators - Benchmarking - ...

Your requirements can easily simulated on paper (like increase the speed once, twice, ...), then translated to unit-tests with a framework like https://github.com/doctest/doctest.

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/

For stuff like this which is very easy to test (very predefined input vs output), I highly suggest using some testing framework. Catch2 is great, but there is also doctest and good ole googletest. If you do this, it would also be a great intro to CI, where you do some plumbing on github or gitlab where every commit causes a build to happen on their servers and run through the unit tests, and if it passes it gets merged into master.

doctest is my favorite framework. Really simple to use, header only, supports compile-time tests, lots of features and it works well with cmake.

Alternatives at the low to medium level of abstraction include civetweb and mongoose, which have a common ancestor. Both of these appear to be C rather than C++, but seem to be production quality and well-documented. Another C library is cpp-httplib, which is probably too low-level for me.

I use this all the time to expose an admin rest interface to my public installations.

I'm using this one: https://github.com/yhirose/cpp-httplib

Every one of these libraries uses CMake to make it easier for end users to consume their libraries. In fact your example uses CMake as well such that I can consume it the way I describe above.

# Template file for 'yuzu-mainline' pkgname=yuzu-mainline version=1295 revision=1 _cubeb_version=75d9d125ee655ef80f3bfcd97ae5a805931042b8 _sanitizers_cmake_version=aab6948fa863bc1cbe5d0850bc46b9ef02ed4c1a _dynarmic_version=bd570e093ca1d1206961296b90df65cda7de8e87 _sirit_version=d7ad93a88864bda94e282e95028f90b5784e4d20 _mbedtls_version=8c88150ca139e06aa2aae8349df8292a88148ea1 _xbyak_version=348e3e548ebac06d243e5881caec8440e249f65f _SDL_version=f17058b562c8a1090c0c996b42982721ace90903 _cpp_jwt_version=e12ef06218596b52d9b5d6e1639484866a8e7067 _cpp_httplib_version=305a7abcb9b4e9e349843c6d563212e6c1bbbf21 _Vulkan_Headers_version=00671c64ba5c488ade22ad572a0ef81d5e64c803 create_wrksrc=yes build_wrksrc=${pkgname}-mainline-0-${version} build_style=cmake configure_args="-DYUZU_CHECK_SUBMODULES=OFF -DYUZU_TESTS=OFF -DSIRIT_USE_SYSTEM_SPIRV_HEADERS=ON" hostmakedepends="pkg-config qt5-host-tools qt5-qmake clang" makedepends="fmt-devel libenet-devel inih-devel libusb-devel liblz4-devel opus-devel zlib-devel libzstd-devel boost-devel qt5-devel qt5-multimedia-devel libva-devel ffmpeg-devel glslang-devel SPIRV-Headers catch2 json-c++ speexdsp-devel" short_desc="Nintendo Switch Emulator" maintainer="Owen Law " license="GPL-3.0-or-later" homepage="https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu-mainline" changelog="${homepage}/releases/tag/mainline-0-${version}" distfiles="${homepage}/archive/refs/tags/mainline-0-${version}.tar.gz https://github.com/herumi/xbyak/archive/${_xbyak_version}.tar.gz https://github.com/MerryMage/dynarmic/archive/${_dynarmic_version}.tar.gz https://github.com/yuzu-emu/mbedtls/archive/${_mbedtls_version}.tar.gz https://github.com/mozilla/cubeb/archive/${_cubeb_version}.tar.gz https://github.com/arsenm/sanitizers-cmake/archive/${_sanitizers_cmake_version}.tar.gz https://github.com/yuzu-emu/sirit/archive/${_sirit_version}.tar.gz https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/archive/${_SDL_version}.tar.gz https://github.com/arun11299/cpp-jwt/archive/${_cpp_jwt_version}.tar.gz https://github.com/yhirose/cpp-httplib/archive/${_cpp_httplib_version}.tar.gz https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Headers/archive/${_Vulkan_Headers_version}.tar.gz" checksum="b8b2616a24653352b8afd145ee46eb9ead07c6ef3aff8c0ff3a6225b381b4b85 fbe54fc881cdfb0876ddc8f29f74674a311ba7ae4b774751cb1b637c043e3bae 170530852547ee2f5517b0a12e643646e51a9974414084d389a85632df7c4518 8d3553ea5c3b47789c5a1a6437f948525d0a8ce2a0897000a36b511000c6bad4 8c5b7ca55ee586a3e5e63de2d31c319045f92e949140a734846a0d69ad342e2e 9f5b073625375322236a94ce8d2d803cdedad321c91e63845f487b9ebfb2c433 6612f924d1f2b2c7cb37effcda5d78550fad276887ee8f9bc391b9ecbf9e4a64 2a149e79712027d2d8141e3233df2f6679825b6f78237db3db72bc6cfc08b845 b4cc0e1f89d3c60a4dde74baa730a90de13c5dd5155b09d8dd34cd3205a6e758 61a97686b03edffa737c396f54e48da2ff0a04c3f6859ec9e80853aea6508030 99443e30caee5d2c0019de6549cc0c7c0432214494617da445753fc46374a7c3" post_extract() { mv "xbyak-${_xbyak_version}" xbyak cp -r xbyak "${build_wrksrc}/externals" mv "dynarmic-${_dynarmic_version}" dynarmic cp -r dynarmic "${build_wrksrc}/externals" mv "mbedtls-${_mbedtls_version}" mbedtls cp -r mbedtls "${build_wrksrc}/externals" mv "SDL-${_SDL_version}" SDL cp -r SDL "${build_wrksrc}/externals" mv "cubeb-${_cubeb_version}" cubeb mv "sanitizers-cmake-${_sanitizers_cmake_version}" sanitizers-cmake cp -r sanitizers-cmake cubeb/cmake cp -r cubeb "${build_wrksrc}/externals" mv "sirit-${_sirit_version}" sirit cp -r sirit "${build_wrksrc}/externals" mv cpp-jwt-${_cpp_jwt_version} cpp-jwt cp -r cpp-jwt ${build_wrksrc}/externals mv cpp-httplib-${_cpp_httplib_version} cpp-httplib cp -r cpp-httplib ${build_wrksrc}/externals mv Vulkan-Headers-${_Vulkan_Headers_version} Vulkan-Headers cp -r Vulkan-Headers ${build_wrksrc}/externals }

Through development I've been making requests to my locally hosted sever using cpphttplib via HTTP and always had the intention of using HTTPS once my website was live. Not the smartest idea to leave this until the end, I know.

Have you tried searching the internet? https://github.com/yhirose/cpp-httplib

I'm new to C++, and have been trying to make a simple HTTP request. I stumbled on cpp-httplib and decided to try it out.