Re: [mosquitto-dev] Moving away from libwebsockets

[Roger Light <roger@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 3 Feb 2021 at 18:13, Greg Troxel <gdt@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> A library with no releases is a bit concerning; that's a sign about
> software engineering attitudes that does not engender confidence in the
> future.  But if it's small, and you add it to the sources and track it
> manually, that still seems better than rewriting it.

There are two libraries in question here: picohttpparser and wslay.

picohttpparser hasn't had its own release, is tiny and I don't think
there's any need to change it, modulo possibly needing http2 support.
It is part of the h2o web server. I don't think it has a separate
release, but is part of the bigger project release. I think it is kept
as a separate repo to make it easier for others to use.

wslay has had releases and is fairly widely packaged. It has some
points I don't like about it, and I'm not sure where it will be in
five years, but it's good for right now.

> (And, a library needed by other things isn't as big as it seems, but
> mosquitto tends to be run on servers that are not doing desktop things.)

I do have in mind openwrt/yocto installations on tiny devices where
switching from libwebsockets to picohttpparser+wslay might mean it is
possible to provide websockets support on systems where is was not
previously possible, given the reduction in object size.

Regards,

Roger