Damian's April Update

May 5, 2019

This month I’ve been working on the following projects:

  • Certify
  • Boost.Beast
  • Boost.Build
  • BeastLounge

Certify

Certify did not have any platform-independent means of caching certificate status (i.e. revoked, valid, unknown), so I implemented one. For now it has to be manually filled, but I’ll add a way to import a static blacklist (somewhat similar to the builtin blacklist in Chrome) and query the status of a certificate. Unfortunately there is no way to handle OCSP stapling within the verification callback invoked by OpenSSL which is quite detrimental to usability. Additionally, OpenSSL doesn’t have a way of starting and waiting for an asynchronous operation within callbacks (without blocking).

Don’t forget to star the repository: https://github.com/djarek/certify!

Boost.Beast

When working on making sure Beast is std::launder-correct, I ran into a number of previously undiagnosed bugs in Beast. All of them have been fixed in v254. I was quite confused why these issues weren’t found by CI previously. I’ve been able to track it down to old toolchain versions in Travis. Additionally, the test matrix lacks a few fairly important variants. Considering the fact that Trusty is no longer supported and the switch to Xenial is inevitable, I’ve decided to port over the CI to Azure Pipelines, because it offers better concurrency which allows the Beast CI to afford a larger test matrix. In the process I’ve also decided to use as many default b2 options as possible, to make future changes to the CI easier. There’s still an issue with Valgrind in Xenial to be resolved (doesn’t support the RDRAND instruction).

Boost.Build

While working on the AzP CI for Beast, I found out that the coverage feature in b2 doesn’t actually set build flags. coverage=all will now properly cause tests to produce gcno and gcda files for consumption by the lcov tool.

BeastLounge

When experimenting with the BeastLounge application running on Heroku I found out that Heroku’s router has a builtin 55s timeout which dropped websocket connections. I solved the issue by making the websocket ping timeouts configurable.

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