Hello Vinnie!

On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 9:02 AM, Vinnie Falco <vinnie.falco_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> There's a new open source library called Beast that implements HTTP
> and WebSocket protocols. Its written in C++ 11, uses only Boost.Asio,
> and compiles on gcc, clang, and Visual Studio. I guess you could
> consider it a competitor to libcurl:
> https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/competitors.html
>
> although, the scope of Beast is that it is strictly a low-level
> library upon which other abstractions may be build (I consider libcurl
> to be a high level library).
>
> You can find Beast here:
> https://github.com/vinniefalco/Beast/

Just my opinion, but a quick comment:

I do most of my programming in c++, but I am glad that libcurl
is old-school.

Because of history and the ecology, there is much greater
cross-compiler ABI compatibility for c than for c++. That
means that you don''t have to rebuild libcurl as often, and
you're more likely to be able to download a pre-built version
of libcurl that meets your needs than would be the case
with a c++ implementation.

Beast's dependence on boost is a concern. (Yes, I know
that it is possible to only build and use parts of boost, but
this is not supported by the boost project. That this is a
real and painful issue is shown by the availability of
third-party scripts that will supposedly delete the parts of
boost you don't want after you have downloaded it. The
intra-boost dependencies are not documented, and there
is no straightforward way to tease them apart.)

This is of course an apples-to-oranges comparison, but
my entire curl-7.31.0-devel-mingw64 directory is 10 MB,
and its lib64 subdirectory is about 6 MB. (libcurl.a itself
is 531 kB.)

I had to use boost for another project. My boost download
directory is 2 GB and my boost build directory is 3 GB.

So, there is a lot to be said for Daniel's 20th-century
c-hacker-ish software philosophy.

> Thanks

Best regards.

K. Frank
-------------------------------------------------------------------
List admin: https://cool.haxx.se/list/listinfo/curl-library
Etiquette: https://curl.haxx.se/mail/etiquette.html
Received on 2016-06-04