libwebsockets VS Boost.Beast

This is just the endemic result of C++ lacking a package manager.

Every library starts out small, adds its own vendored utilities, adds its own dependencies, and eventually becomes boost.

To be fair to this project, theyve worked quite hard to make the library consumable by others… but yes, its hard to look at the code like https://github.com/warmcat/libwebsockets/blob/50ba61082dc40b...

…and not go… really? As part of the core of libwebsocket?

When you read the justification it’s mostly “well we have a good framework now, so why not use it for other things too?”

C++ life.

/shrug

I'm trying to setup a project using libwebsockets.

Libwebsockets a powerful and lightweight pure C library\ (48 comments)

and how others have implemented the client

There is at least one notable exception to this rule: https://github.com/boostorg/beast/issues/1445

I am using this example : https://github.com/boostorg/beast/blob/develop/example/websocket/client/async-ssl/websocket_client_async_ssl.cpp My application is listening to tick data streams of crypto exchanges over the websockets and processing and sending orders to the exchange.

We used beast to implement a market data server(and I think we also did a small client, to test it) which was sending protobuf messages, and it worked great(we also used boost adio, which made it very scalable). When we tested the server, we were generating around 100k messages per second(when there was the biggest activity on the market), I think I've posted here some stats: https://github.com/boostorg/beast/issues/2313.

Boost Beast?

And Chris wrote this example, which is faster than any of my other examples: https://github.com/boostorg/beast/tree/21cd552399aa8167ed53c21a74f3711c2c316d2f/example/http/server/fast

cmake -h. -Bbuild && cmake --build build

to work about 90% of the time. Far more luck than I've had with autotools.

> Its code is horrifying too, for example:

1) I'm sure I could find some horriffic code in meson too if I went digging. 2) The alternative to this is you having to write something equivalent in your own code, meaning that in my code I don't need to do stuff like [0] in my code to detect features; my build system handles it for me. 3) CMake supports more platforms and targets than I've ever seen in my life, and likely supports more compilers than are necessary. that's a blessing and a curse, but it means that if I write simple program to run on some crufty microcontroller with a bastardised gcc toolchain from the 90s, it's fairly likely that cmake supports it out of the box. Code like that is the price to pay for that level of support.

[0] https://github.com/boostorg/beast/blob/b7344b0d501f23f763a76...

If you need an embedded C++ HTTP server then there are plenty of libraries/frameworks (in random order): Crow, RESTinio, Boost.Beast, cpp-httplib, http_backend, Pistache, RestBed, served, proxygen, Simple-Web-Server, drogon, oat++.