[swift-server-dev] HTTP Parser

[Helge Heß]

Hi Logan,

On 03 Nov 2016, at 17:50, Logan Wright <logan at qutheory.io> wrote:
> Yup, you can see a lot of it in the underlying engine module from Vapor.

is it this one?:

  https://github.com/vapor/engine/blob/master/Sources/HTTP/Parser/HTTPParser.swift

that seems to be a pull based / blocking parser, right? That probably doesn’t work for a lot of environments.


Personally I’d suggest a small wrapper around this one:

  https://github.com/nodejs/http-parser

It is small, fast, highly efficient, zero copy, push based, supports chunked&upgrade and is extremely well tested and widely deployed.


I also did a straight port of that to Swift, though if you can use the C version I wouldn't use the port as it is significantly slower (and may have extra bugs introduced during the port):

  https://github.com/NozeIO/Noze.io/tree/master/Sources/http_parser

My approach here was to keep it close to the original, which makes for really ugly code :-)
I think it may be worthwhile to do another attempt of a port of the parser, but less 1:1 like mine, in a Swiftier way (the original uses a lot of goto’s :-).


As mentioned, I wouldn’t expect people to use the low level API but rather have nice objects filled by the underlying parser. What about `WORequest` & `WOResponse`? :-)


BTW: Something I consider important to discuss across all areas of interest (crypto, sockets, HTTP) is a protocol to represent a chunks of bytes and chunks of chunks of bytes (buckets and brigades in Apache terms). Of course that could be just NSData or DispatchData but I expect that some frameworks have their own way to represent such buffers, hence a protocol would be nice.
Why important? Well, because there needs to be a way to pass the data between those components w/o copying it :-)

hh

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