Re: [boost] [beast] Request for Discussion

Subject: Re: [boost] [beast] Request for Discussion
From: Peter Dimov (lists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-09-23 17:17:08

Vinnie Falco wrote:
...
> This is the lowest level of functionality a library can offer with respect 
> to HTTP. All higher level operations can be expressed in terms of these 
> primitives. The corollary is all higher level operations are impossible 
> without any of these operations.

I'm fairly sure - without even having to look - that the proposed Beast 
library more than meets Boost's criteria for inclusion.

You need to not let these objections frustrate you. The basic problem here 
is that C++ programmers still, in $current_year, have no standard way of 
opening a stream to https://whatever.com/archive.tar.gz and reading it. This 
is incredibly annoying. Yes, you're right that a simple API would mean that 
I can't pass a client certificate to it. At this point though anything, 
ANYTHING, is better than what we have, which is nil.

So it comes to no surprise that whenever the words "Boost", "HTTP" and 
"library" occur together in a sentence, everyone (to a first approximation) 
hopes that we'll finally get that simple API.

You don't have to provide something like that, and this is not a 
prerequisite for accepting the lower-level Beast. But many people will be 
happy if you do.

Plus, there's also the matter that to evaluate the lower-level API, you have 
to have something built on top of it with which to evaluate it.