Crow Alternatives

Crow reviews and mentions

• REST APIs using C++. (Is this even done much?)
  13 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp | 29 Mar 2023

  How about Crow?

• What library/framework to use for writing a Web server?
  3 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp_questions | 24 Aug 2022

  https://github.com/CrowCpp/Crow is super easy to use

• Transport agnostic Websocket library
  6 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp | 14 Jul 2022

  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 :)

• What's next after learncpp.com?
  6 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp | 1 Jul 2022

  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.

• Can I use C++ in the backend ?? Any frameworks there ??
  4 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp | 15 Jun 2022

  I've been working on Crow for quite a while now, it's a pretty cool framework IMO.

• Have there been any attempts to build a REST API service on top of either Boost.asio or Boost.beast?
  2 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp_questions | 22 Apr 2022

  You can also consider https://crowcpp.org/.

• Networking TS: first impression and questions;
  4 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp | 9 Apr 2022
• A year and a half ago I picked up an abandoned C++ web Framework, Today we released v1.0
  2 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp | 29 Mar 2022

  cmake_minimum_required (VERSION 3.11) project(crow_test LANGUAGES CXX VERSION 0.0.1 ) add_executable(crow_test) set_property(TARGET crow_test PROPERTY CXX_STANDARD 17) file(GLOB sources src/*.cpp src/*.h) target_sources(crow_test PRIVATE ${sources} ) find_package(Threads REQUIRED) # use static libs for all projects SET(BUILD_SHARED_LIBS OFF CACHE BOOL "Use static libs") # --- Fetch CROW -------------------------------------------------------------- include(FetchContent) set(FETCHCONTENT_UPDATES_DISCONNECTED TRUE) FetchContent_Declare(crow GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/CrowCpp/Crow GIT_TAG v1.0 ) FetchContent_GetProperties(crow) if(NOT crow_POPULATED) FetchContent_Populate(crow) add_subdirectory(${crow_SOURCE_DIR} ${crow_BINARY_DIR} EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL) endif() # ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ target_link_libraries(crow_test PRIVATE Crow::Crow ) install(TARGETS crow_test RUNTIME DESTINATION .) install(DIRECTORY static/ DESTINATION static) set(CPACK_INCLUDE_TOPLEVEL_DIRECTORY OFF) set(CPACK_OUTPUT_FILE_PREFIX "") set(CPACK_GENERATOR "ZIP" CACHE STRING "Zip Generator") include(CPack)

  2 projects | reddit.com/r/cpp | 29 Mar 2022

  Today we released version 1.0, which aside from being the first non pre-release version, improves considerably on all parts of the framework. The changes include Blueprints (similar to python flask), a new HTTP Parser, CMake support, easily allowing multiple source files in downstream projects, C++20 support, and many more features and fixes. full changelog here.

• The Lisp Curse
  11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2022

  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/

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