pybind11 VS Mongoose

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.

I have a C++ function computing a large tensor which I would like to return to Python as a NumPy array via pybind11.

This is based on the Google Ink Stroke Modeler C++ library, and using pybind11 to make it available on python.

pybind11 makes it easy to call C++ from Python if you want to mix.

If you've never used Pybind before these pybind tests[1] and this repo[2] have good examples you can crib to get started (in addition to the docs). Once you handle passing/returning/creating the main data types (list, tuple, dict, set, numpy array) the first time, then it's mostly smooth sailing.

Pybind offers a lot of functionality, but core "good parts" I've found useful are (a) use a numpy array in Python and pass it to a C++ method to work on, (b) pass your python data structure to pybind and then do work on it in C++ (some copy overhead), and (c) Make a class/struct in C++ and expose it to Python (so no copying overhead and you can create nice cache-aware structs, etc.).

[1] https://github.com/pybind/pybind11/blob/master/tests/test_py...

I have a python module for which the logic is written in C++ and I use pybind11 to expose the objects and functions to Python.

Reading from Python requires a wrapper, using pybind11 this is fairly done.

Also I can highly recommend starting using C++ to augment your Python code, i.e. find the parts that are slow or undoable in Python and write those in C++ then expose them as Python functions. You can use https://github.com/pybind/pybind11 to call C++ code from Python.

I've found myself at this webpage multiple times while trying to minimize the complexity of APIs in my C projects.

My conclusion for now is that C coroutines are something to be left to the implementer. For example: Mongoose (https://github.com/cesanta/mongoose) uses event callbacks to deal with asynchronousness. It is much more pleasant to wrap a library like this in whatever thread/task primitives your system has rather than try to integrate the mythical cross-platform c couroutine.

I remember using mongoose 15 years back. Today i would have considered mongoose(10k+ stars) which is also a mature c/c++ web server[1] if not the licence.

https://github.com/cesanta/mongoose/tree/master/examples

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.

Since this is only going to be used internally would Mongoose be worth considering?

Here’s an example: https://mongoose.ws/

If you are looking for something simple there is mongoose from cesanta, https://github.com/cesanta/mongoose