Cancellation in Beast/Asio and Better Compile Performance with Beast.Websocket This month I will be discussing two issues. One of interest to many people who come to us with questions on the Github Issue Tracker and the #beast channel of Cpplang Slack. Compile Times and Separation of Concerns A common complaint about Boost.Beast is that compilation units that use the websocket::stream template class often take a long time to compile, and that because websocket::stream is a template, this...

Reviewing the review The review period for Boost.JSON has come and gone, and we got some great feedback on the design of the library. Glancing over the results, it appears that the general mood was to accept the library. This doesn’t mean that there weren’t any problem areas – most notably the documentation, which often did contain the information people wanted, but it was difficult to find. Other points of contention were the use of a push parser as opposed to a pull parser, the use of dou...

Boost.JSON Boost.JSON is officially scheduled for review! It starts on September 14th, so there isn’t much time left to finish up polishing the library – but it looks like we will make the deadline. Optimize, optimize, optimize Boost.JSON’s performance has significantly increased in the past month. The change to the parsing functions where we pass and return const char* instead of result (detailed in my last post) was merged, bringing large gains across the board. After this, my work on op...

New Debugging Feature in Asio and Beast As covered previously, Boost 1.74 brought an implementation of the new unified executors model to Boost.Asio. Support for this is not the only thing that is new in Beast. Chris Kohlhoff recently submitted a PR to Beast’s repository demonstrating how to annotate source code with the BOOST_ASIO_HANDLER_LOCATION macro. I have since followed up and annotated all asynchronous operations in Beast this way. In a normal build, there is no effect (and zero...

Boost 1.74 - Progress Update Boost 1.74 beta release has been published and the various maintainers are applying last-minute bug fixes to their libraries in readiness for the final release on 12th August. For us in the Beast team, a fair amount of attention has been spent monitoring last minutes changes to Asio, as Chris makes the final tweaks after the Unified Executors update I mentioned in last month’s blog. Comprehensive Testing Last month I committed what I hoped would be the firs...