Re: [boost] [review][beast] Review of Beast starts today : July 1 - July 10

Subject: Re: [boost] [review][beast] Review of Beast starts today : July 1 - July 10
From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-07-01 18:08:11

On 01/07/2017 17:02, Vinnie Falco via Boost wrote:
>> - For this collection of HTTP-related library routines...
> 
> It seems that WebSocket is the red-headed stepchild that no one talks
> about. Of course, I understand that the HTTP portions of Beast are far
> more interesting (controversial?) so I guess we'll be talking about
> that for most of the review.

Beast WebSocket belongs in another, separate library. That library could
bring in ASIO as a dependency.

>> I do not see why any awareness of ASIO is needed at all.
> 
> Also stated in the documentation:
> "...using the consistent asynchronous model of Boost.Asio."
> <http://vinniefalco.github.io/beast/beast/introduction.html>
> 
>> I don't get why it's needed,
> 
> Boost.Asio is effectively what will become the standard way to do C++
> networking (i.e. N4588).  Beast recognizes that C++ will soon have a
> common, cross-platform networking interface and builds on that
> interface exclusively.

I snipped all the hand waving as irrelevant to the question I posed,
which it is.

You didn't answer the question. These are the stated things Beast provides:

1. Message containers

2. Stream reading

3. Stream writing

4. Serialisation

5. Parsing

... which seem a reasonable and useful subset of HTTP to implement.

You have told me no reason why any of these needs a hard dependency on
any networking implementation, or awareness of any specific networking
design pattern.

I personally can see no good reason why they should be: **HTTP has
nothing to do with networking**. It therefore seems to me that reading
ought to be calculated views of underlying byte data, and writing ought
to be compositing a sequence of byte spans to gather into a send. Like
the Ranges TS does.

Please convince me that I am wrong.

Niall

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