$ show boostorg/beast
Boost.Beast is a high-performance C++ networking library providing HTTP/1.1 and WebSocket protocol implementations built on Boost.Asio. It is a header-only (with optional separate compilation) library that offers a comprehensive set of vocabulary types, parsers, serializers, stream wrappers, and composed asynchronous operations for building networked applications. The library emphasizes symmetry, ease of use, flexibility, and performance, and includes extensive examples covering synchronous, asynchronous, coroutine (stackful and C++20), and awaitable patterns. It follows the Boost library design conventions and is part of the official Boost collection. The codebase demonstrates high craftsmanship with careful attention to allocators, error handling, executor propagation, and cancellation. While there is some duplication across examples and a few deprecated APIs, the core production headers are well-maintained and actively developed. The library also includes zlib compression for WebSocket permessage-deflate and experimental testing utilities.
The LLM identified 4 files worth highlighting for reuse:
A fixed-capacity string class template that provides a std::string-like interface without dynamic memory allocation. It demonstrates careful handling of small-string optimization, constexpr construction, and full iterator support. Reusable as a standalone component for any project needing a stack-allocated string with bounded size.
A utility to concatenate multiple buffer sequences into a single viewable buffer sequence without copying. It uses a tuple of sequences and provides forward traversal. This is a self-contained pattern useful for any networking library or I/O code that needs to combine scatter-gather buffer lists efficiently.
Provides classes and functions for serializing HTTP chunked transfer encoding: chunk_header, chunk_body, chunk_last, and basic_chunk_extensions. These are allocator-aware and designed for incremental output. The implementation is independent of the rest of Beast's HTTP machinery and can be extracted for projects needing raw chunked transfer support.
A UTF-8 validator used for WebSocket message validation. It processes bytes sequentially and tracks state for incomplete sequences. Though part of WebSocket internals, it is self-contained and can be used independently for UTF-8 validation in any C++ project that requires RFC 3629 compliance without external dependencies.