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7581 :: Show Nim: Puppy - Easy HTTP(S) requests without DLLs, --d:ssl or cacerts.pem.

• treeform (orginal) [2021-03-04T22:10:16+01:00] view original

  Hey, @guzba and I work on Windows so the recent Nim update kind of gave us some trouble by breaking how we use SSL. We also don't really love having to remember -d:ssl all the time, so we've made a new simple HTTP(S) lib for making requests.

  We've called it Puppy because it plays fetch with web pages!

  Instead of using Nim's HTTP stack we've chosen to use system APIs (WinHttp on Windows, libcurl on Mac / Linux). This means no -d:ssl, no worrying about cacerts.pem file, no remembering to ship dlls, no worrying about anything like that. Further, you get system level updates to certs for security etc. It's just a different choice that works for us. Also @guzba excellent work adding the zippy gzip inflation to all responses automatically and transparently. So portable, compressed and fast!

  The repo is at: https://github.com/treeform/puppy

  Give it a try if you need a simple way to get stuff from websites.

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• benob (orginal) [2021-03-04T22:16:09+01:00] view original

  This is really cool, I'll try it.

  Any plan for async?

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• treeform (orginal) [2021-03-04T22:18:50+01:00] view original

  I don't think it will support async because it uses the OS apis directly. It's a much harder problem then. I don't have plans for it, but patches welcome.

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• dom96 (orginal) [2021-03-05T16:16:34+01:00] view original

  This is really awesome. It has been my dream to support this directly in the httpclient module in the stdlib, do you know whether the WinAPI you're using supports async?

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• treeform (orginal) [2021-03-05T17:35:16+01:00] view original

  In theory it has if you use polling, but that would not be very performent. There is no epoll like notifying system. They recommend threads.

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• pietroppeter (orginal) [2021-03-05T17:59:23+01:00] view original

  What about the JS backend? It should be doable, right?

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• treeform (orginal) [2021-03-05T19:13:52+01:00] view original

  Maybe possible in node.js, but browser JS backend HTTP API is all callback based. It would have to be a different API.

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• federico3 (orginal) [2021-03-07T16:55:52+01:00] view original

  Puppy seems to be dynamically linking Libcurl. Does it means Puppy will do things listed in https://curl.se/libcurl/security.html like automatically reading .netrc ?

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