gopher-plus VS HTTP Parser

Shameless plug: I recently wrote a gopher client library for Deno, just for fun. https://github.com/matt1/deno-gopher

I also cleaned-up the weird formatting of the Gopher+ protocol and put it on github as a formatted markdown file since it was never and official RFC so trawling through an unstructured txt file when trying to implement the protocol was a pain: https://github.com/gopher-protocol/gopher-plus

Hope it is useful for someone implementing new gopher code like I was! :)

I think it is a bit of a chicken and an egg problem. There are a few Gopher+ servers out there, and the Gopher+ protocol is pretty flexible and designed with the metaverse in mind originally (see GopherVR from the original authors).

It is a shame that a lot of current Gopher users seem to be strongly against anything apart from standard Gopher, when the original authors of the protocol had much grander ideas for interactivity & visual interfaces. Sigh.

For anyone interested, the Gopher+ protocol doc never made it to a proper RFC, but is on github in a hyper-linked format to make it easier to read: https://github.com/gopher-protocol/gopher-plus/blob/main/gop...

https://github.com/gopher-protocol/gopher-plus/blob/main/gop... specifically mentions 3D representations of Gopherspace.

It looks not too different from the majority of HTTP parsers out there written in C. Here is an example of NodeJS [0].

[0] https://github.com/nodejs/http-parser/blob/main/http_parser....

NodeJS's HTTP parser used to be a handwritten C lib: http-parser

Whoa, I didn't know that! But yeah, it seems like https://github.com/nodejs/http-parser is based on nginx. It now uses https://github.com/nodejs/llhttp but has some of the same legacy.

On the other hand, deno's HTTP stuff is built on top of Hyper, a Rust library https://github.com/hyperium/hyper

Boost.Beast has its own HTTP parser[0], during the development of which Vinnie Falco (the principle author of Beast) found many bugs/inconsistencies in Node.js's own parser[1]

[0] https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/develop/libs/beast/doc/html/b...

[1] https://github.com/nodejs/http-parser/issues?q=is%3Aissue+au...

For cases where it is necessary to pass local information to/from a callback, the http_parser object's data field can be used.

Legacy HTTP/1.1 suffers a few issues, see the current RFC errata:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/errata_search.php?rfc=7230&rec_st...

There are issues particularly around how whitespace and obsolete line folding should be handled

https://github.com/nodejs/http-parser/issues?q=is%3Aissue+wh...

https://github.com/httpwg/http-core/issues/53

It's not as trivial as a few string splits.

There's picohttpparser and the one used in node.js: https://github.com/nodejs/http-parser