nanosock

The only minimal and sane socket wrapper for C++ in existence

Why?

Because all existing network and socket libraries for C++ are absolute disasters:

• Bloated "frameworks" without proper separation of concerns.
• Undocumented for sane use-cases.
• Full of untested functionality and corner cases. (Looking at you, ASIO blocking operations.)
• Full of insanely broken semantics for working with streams of data.
• Important first-class features like read timeout support are usually an afterthought.

What is this?

This is a thoughtful, but minimal header file for setting up client sockets, making requests and sanely reading the results.

Included is an HTTP client implementation, with pipelining and multi-stream support.

Caveats:

• Tested only for Linux.
• No server socket support yet, only sockets for making requests and reading data. (To be done if there's demand.)
• Blocking, synchronous operations only.

How to use?

Just include nanosock.h or http_request.h.

nanosock.h are the socket building blocks. http_request.h is an implementation of a state machine for making HTTP requests and reading responses based on nanosock.h.

nanosock.h

See the included tools/example.cc for usage; but briefly, there are only three classes here:

• Socket(host, port, timeout) - socket wrapper for reading and writing; no buffering.
• Buffer - a buffer that can read chunks of data from a socket.
• Reader<MARKER>(terminator) - a wrapper around a Buffer that reads data until the terminator condition is encountered. Data is passed to a user-defined callback function.

MARKER is a template parameter that should be a terminator condition. Three are provided out of the box:

Marker(std::string) - read data until the provided string is encountered.

Count(size_t) - read data in fixed-size chunks of this size.

template <typename... MARKER> AnyOf<MARKER...> - read data until one of the provided terminator conditions fires.

http_request.h

See the included tools/get.cc for usage. There is one class for implementing the HTTP request state machine, and one class for multiplexing concurrent HTTP requests.

• Request(host, port, timeout)
• Mux

Public API:

nano::Socket(const std::string& host, unsigned int port, unsigned int timeout=0)

Connects a socket to a host and port. The timeout value is in milliseconds (so 3 seconds is 3000), the default value of 0 means 'do not enable a timeout'.

void Socket::send(const std::string& s)

Writes data to a socket.

nano::Buffer()

Creates a buffer.

nano::Reader<nano::Marker>(const std::string& terminator)

nano::Reader<nano::Count>(size_t)

nano::Reader<nano::AnyOf<nano::Marker, nano::Count, ...>>(const std::string, size_t, ...)

Creates a reader object for messages with the given end-of-message marker.

bool Reader::operator()(BUFF& buff, SOCK& sock, FUNC func)

Reads from the socket until the end-of-message marker is encountered. The data read, up to and including the end-of-message marker itself, is passed to func as a const std::string&.

Returns true if the end-of-message marker was read.

Returns false if the end-of-message marker was not read with all the available data. operator() should be called again to fetch the rest of the message.

When false is returned, func is called with the available data even though the message is incomplete.

Throws a nano::EndOfSocket exception when attempting to read from a closed socket.

nano::http::Request(const std::string& host, unsigned int port, unsigned int timeout=0)

Creates an object for making HTTP requests and receiving responses. This object will create Socket, Buffer and Reader objects as necessary. Connection will be established upon creation of the Request.

void nano::http::Request::send(const std::string& method, const std::string& path, const std::string& body)

Sends an HTTP request to the connected server. The Request must not be in the process of reading a response.

bool nano::http::Request::transfer(auto& responder, bool blocking = true)

Read a response. responder is a user-provided object to recieve response messages, with the following required methods:

void version(const std::string&)

void code(const std::string&)

void header(const std::string&, const std::string&)

void body(const std::string&)

One body payload may be passed as several calls of body().

Returns true if all of the message has been read and the Request object is ready for send()-ing the next request.

blocking is used for implementing the stream multiplexor; see below.

nano::Mux<nano::http::Request>()

A multiplexor object for handling several concurrent HTTP streams in one thread.

nano::http::Request nano::Mux::add(const std::string& host, unsigned int port, unsigned int timeout=0)

Creates a Request object and adds it to the multiplexor. Returns the just created object.

void nano::Mux::wait(FUNC func, unsigned int timeout)

Waits for available data for any of the multiplexed Request objects and calls func if data is available. timeout is how many milliseconds to wait for data. Throws a nano::Timeout exception on timeout.

func is called with two arguments: Request& req and bool blocking; the first argument is the triggered Request object, and the second argument must be transparently passed to Request::transfer().

N.B. Theoretically, streams with other protocols than just HTTP can be multiplexed. The underlying objects must provide Socket& socket() and bool drained() methods.