networking-ts-impl VS Crow

Hi, I am an experienced C++ programmers, but a beginner by network programming. I plan to develop a C++ network application, so decided to try the Networking TS. I have been trying to figure out how to use it for 3 days, and I am starting to understand things a little. I first tried using the std::experimental::net that comes with gcc in Ubuntu 20.04, but it turned out to be incomplete. In order to make the code work, I had to use this github repository instead: https://github.com/chriskohlhoff/networking-ts-impl. The last commit was 2 years ago. Is it the recommended implementation? I tried to teach myself how to use it by following the boost::asio tutorial. It was a bit difficult because of the differences between the two libraries, but I managed to translate the asio tutorial samples without using any boost library. I was surprised that I had to pass the port number as a string to net::ip::tcp::resolver::resolve. Wouldn't it be much better to use an int override, both in terms of implementation and usage of this function? I really don't like having to convert my port number to a string. Is there a way to do it without the conversion? I also dislike the enable_shared_from_this trick used in the boost::asio examples. It looks like a dirty anti-pattern. I feel it is possible to do things much more cleanly without it. I tried to implement an echo server differently: the server keeps a std::list, and the completion handlers are members of the server class instead of the connection class. They take an iterator to the list as parameter, and can cleanly erase the connection from the list. I feel it is much cleaner and simpler than sending connections from lambda to lambda, and using tricks to let them commit suicide by themselves. Is there any advantage of enable_shared_from_this compared to what I do? The scope of boost::asio is wider than networking, and I am surprised that C++ seems to be restricting it to networking. I understand that standardizing a library is a lot of work, and taking care of networking first should‍ have priority. But why not call it std::asio instead, and leave the possibility to add asynchronous file operation to it later?

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/.