https

HTTPS and WSS library. This is an experimental replacement for Boost::Beast.

Installation

Copy the contents of src into your project then link to Boost::asio. If you're using transport over TLS, then link to OpenSSL::SSL and OpenSSL::Crypto.

Examples

Try out:

• server.cpp
• client_http.cpp
• client_ws_awaitable.cpp
• client_ws_coro.cpp

Build using:

$ cmake ./examples -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
$ cmake --build build --parallel

Unit tests

Build as above. Run using:

$ ./build/tests

Benchmarks

I benchmarked the example server using ab.

I used the following commands for HTTP and HTTPS respectively:

$ ab -A Tommy:Aldridge -n 500000 -c <C> -k http://localhost:8000/ok
$ ab -A Tommy:Aldridge -n 500000 -c <C> -k https://localhost:8000/ok

Note, the example server is single threaded, uses C++20 coroutines and basic authentication (not particularly well optimized). I modified the program to use TLS 1.2 as ab doesn't support TLS 1.3. I have an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz 12 core processor. I'm using gcc 13.1.0 and openssl 3.0.2. Here are the results:

Transport	Connections	Requests / s
TCP	1	46343.67
TCP	2	84973.53
TCP	5	101081.90
TCP	10	108060.56
TLS	1	32172.07
TLS	2	58033.97
TLS	5	67345.94
TLS	10	69167.37

Not bad.

Roadmap

• Chunked encoding
• Documentation

Questions

• Q: Why not use Beast?

  A: I find Beast bloated and unecessarily complicated. HTTP1 and WS are simple protocols. There is SO MUCH source code in Beast and I'm not convinced it's proportionate. Additionally, you don't need Beast objects like basic_stream or flat_buffer. All you need are a few structs, enums, Asio composed operations and voila.

• Q: Why are you not writing the base library Sans-IO? It's the fashion!

  A: Because I'm only going to use this with Asio. I don't mind having state-machine logic inside an Asio composed operation rather than something custom. As far as I can tell, the only motivation for Sans-IO is unit tests. It means you don't have to open a socket.