CppCon 2018: Vinnie Falco “Get rich quick! Using Boost.Beast WebSockets and Networking TS”

CppCon.org
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Presentation Slides, PDFs, Source Code and other presenter materials are available at: github.com/CppCon/CppCon2018
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Do you want to make a lot of money? You'll see some examples of free browser and server based WebSocket programs which have earned their respective individual authors tens of millions of dollars in no time at all. Perhaps after seeing this talk in person, you'll write the next massively successful WebSocket app!
The WebSocket protocol powers the interactive web by enabling two-way messaging between the browser and the web server. The Boost.Beast library implements this protocol on top of the industry standard Boost.Asio library which models the Networking Technical Specification proposed for the ISO C++ Standard.
This presentation introduces Networking TS concepts and algorithms, how to read their requirements, and how to use them in your programs. We will build from scratch a multi-user chat server in C++11 using Beast, and the corresponding browser-based chat client in HTML and JavaScript. No prior knowledge or understanding of Beast or Asio is required, the talk is suited for everyone.
Access the source code and slides for this talk at github.com/vinniefalco/CppCon...
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Vinnie Falco
President, The C++ Alliance
I'm the author of BearShare, DSPFilters, and most importantly Boost.Beast - a C++ header only library that offers implementations for HTTP and WebSockets, located here: github.com/boostorg/beast/
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Videos Filmed & Edited by Bash Films: www.BashFilms.com
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[@SuperFritch42]

This is the best talk I've seen that spanned a lot of concepts in a clear way. 👏👏👏

[@srcmake]

Your talk was god-tier dude. The entire presentation was amazing, on every level.

[@nancyfalco4642]

Its wonderful to hear the voice of my wonderful Vinnie. My child prodigy and creator of Bear Share. I miss you so m u c h!

[@rmpowell77]

Really great video. So much content that I found myself having to frequently pause and go back to review. Powerfully simple.

[@fourscoreand9884]

Thanks for all your great work, Vinnie.

[@andrelucas8950]

That was worth a thousand pages of documentation, thank you!

[@mzimbres]

Another great talk from Vinnie. With the networking TS and Beast I would not be surprised to see C++ taking some place from Erlang in realtime communication. Thanks to Vinnie for making this library available to us.

[@CristianMarletta]

Great talk, super clear and Vinnie keeps it always interesting.

[@alexeiz]

Damn! Networking in C++ used to be complicated. Now everyone is going to know how to do that in relatively few lines of code.

[@thevinn]

Have no fear, we are far from removing the last remaining complexities from C++ :)

[@vladyslav007]

It's not actually a complicated though. Just try to write something using boost::asio and then imagine that standard C++ asio will be better (you might not feel that much pain when boost requires handlers to be CopyConstructible, but it's a hell of a pain).

[@thevinn]

@@vladyslav007 Boost.Asio only requires MoveConstructible handlers now, as of Boost 1.66.

[@aryangupta9034]

@@thevinn I wish that were to be true, but boost still requires CopyConstructible: www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_70_0/doc/html/boost_asio/overview/cpp2011/move_handlers.html ("However, handler types are still required to be copy constructible")

[@jiwang4342]

great material! thanks for your great work!

[@jordan4220]

That was quite a rich talk and just what I was looking for. I was really confused with the examples online. That transfer of ownership paradigm with the shared from this was very unintuitive to me. I like the JavaScript lessons and how everyone was so amazed at how easily it was to do the client socket in a higher level language.

[@baumstamp5989]

printing money as we speak

[@juryk666]

Thanks for making this video! So helpful.

[@norikazuoshiro6324]

30 seconds deadline for session deletion because i didn't want to use shared pointers. i learned something new today.

[@starl1ghtsc2]

whut? Could you explain this please

[@norikazuoshiro6324]

When i first time used asio, i have a session object that handle 2 sockets (2 strand). If one of the sockets closed, i couldn't immediately free the session since the other socket still using share states in their complete hanlde (run async on other thread). I didn't know how to syn this so i made a deadline timmer to let everything clean up before deletion. It is really bad design, but would be easier if i used share pointers. i'm newbie so still have to learn more.

[@FabienFabienB]

Amazing presentation. It requires multiple listen to fully grasp the full extent which is really necessary to mast low level websocket in C++. Curious about Beast alternate implementation and how they fare in terms of performance / ease of use.

[@teras418]

**claps** great talk! love your code and libs Vinnie !

[@IllumTheMessage]

Great talk Vinnie.

[@starriet]

around 20:40) I think `while(N--)` should be `while(--N)`, since the intent is making the vector contain N-1 threads, not N threads. Anyway, thanks for the wonderful talk!

[@PixelPulse168]

This technology gives me chills.

[@immabreakaleg]

as in "I hope I won't ever have to use it cuz these apis with fncs like consume and commit suck ass?" or as in it's awesome?

[@immabreakaleg]

spoke too soon, this talk gets better!!

[@aaronr.9644]

Great talk.

[@zhaoli2984]

Nice, thank you

[@jaysistar2711]

I would really like a talk about Boost.Beast with the Networking TS and the Coroutines TS. If there isn't one, I think we will all get too comfortable with JavaScript async/await. C++ needs coroutines here to simplify the lifetime of the state, not just the control flow, using an allocator that allocates out of a a std::array in the coroutine frame. It would be nice if someone would make this not-yet-done talk.

[@xfreeman86]

Why does ConstBufferSequence require CopyConstructible instead of just MoveConstructible? How many coexistent copies does the write method create internally?

[@thevinn]

Well, consider an operation X on a buffer sequence which is expressed in terms of two or more calls to operation Y which operates on a subset of the buffer sequence. If this operation X is invoked on a buffer sequence that only supports MoveConstructible, then ownership of the buffer sequence would transfer to the first invocation of operation Y. At this point operation Y could not be invoked again, because operation X no longer has ownership of the buffer sequence (it is in the moved-from state).

[@xfreeman86]

@@thevinn A ConstBufferSequence is just a pointer and a size. Why can't X construct its own move-only view of the same values (e.g. via the overload `const_buffer buffer(const const_buffer & b)`) to pass to Y? As it is requiring CopyConstructible, it doesn't mind constructing a new ConstBufferSequence.

[@AYetau]

Could someone please explain to me the reasons of the reoccurring Javascript bashing here at cppcon talks? Or how should it be understood if not bashing? Is it just a popular humorous handling of other languages in general, more like a running gag? But if I should keep my hands away from JavaScript in productive code, for what reasons and what's the better alternative?

[@thevinn]

Well, I wouldn't go so far as calling it "bashing" but the level of expertise required to learn and use JavaScript is far lower than that required to learn and use C++. As a consequence, there are many more JavaScript programmers than there are C++ programmers. Correspondingly, there are many more BAD JavaScript programmers than there are bad C++ programmers. JavaScript is also harder to maintain as the size of the program increases. This doesn't mean that large C++ programs are automatically more maintainable, but C++ gives you more tools to keep software entropy down. In particular, the type system in C++ is quite robust. I'm not making a value judgement here, each language has its own strengths and weaknesses. As you can see from watching my talk, JavaScript let me put up a GUI and implement a multi-user chat client very quickly, with a tiny amount of code. JavaScript definitely has its place we just need to make sure that we are using it for the right things. And of course JavaScript made the two authors I profiled in my talk quite rich, so who can really argue against it? :)

[@frydac]

Also, keep in mind that, quoting bjarne: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." There is also a lot of complaining about C++ out there, and they are, sometimes :) , not wrong.. it is what it is, it's big, it's complicated, there are good parts, there are not so good parts.. but ppl get things up and running in the real world right now (while complaining non-stop about it (referring to some coworkers)). I guess the same can be said for JavaScript

[@thevinn]

@@frydac Hah, love it! Bjarne, ever so pragmatic!

[@videojeroki]

great presentation ! too bad i don't use websocket stuff ;)

[@bsuperbrain]

it is 2022 and still no standardized networking in c++

[@pazdziochowaty]

I think Qt5 websocket library seems easier to use (doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwebsockets-simplechat-example.html does something similar to what is presented here). I would prefer it unless there is a strong need that my application has to use pure standard and boost

[@Rust_Rust_Rust]

Nope 🙅🏻 Qt5 is bloated

[@llothar68]

The problem is that this is just using the 1970ths old socket API, so it's boring 50 year old stuff. With 40 or 100GBit Network adapters, the Berkley Socket API is just not useable anymore. Once 20 years ago there was talk about 10K program now it's 10M. Do research but we will pull out the whole networking api into user space and assign threads direct to them as handlers. There will be a lot of software changes to make this scale.

[@VivekNa]

Just because something is old doesn't mean it's bad. There's nothing boring about UNIX sockets - it's run the internet and stuff that predated the internet since decades. Even if you did invent something better, were stuck with sockets unless the new thing has a revolutionary benefit. You can build whatever abstractions you want over and above the sockets layer. The fact that agar.io is able to allow so many players, shows the efficiency of the system. This talk was just a demo to illustrate how to go about wrapping the lower level layer into a higher level API without losing efficiency and a primer of how to use asio

[@llothar68]

​@@VivekNa Old == Inefficient for modern technology. The current API doesn't scale. Just use google, there are modern attempts. And i hope we get coroutines soon because they are absolutely required if you just have a few tens of nanoseconds for every frame. Like filesystems (i really fucking hate them) we really need to go away from the classic 50 year old unix design. But it's very hard to talk about this to people who are extremely conservative and blind for real world needs and advantages.

[@thevinn]

@@llothar68 Coroutines are a notational convenience they do not improve performance relative to callbacks. The Networking TS api scales just fine, plenty of companies are using them with fiber / 100GB backbones with custom drivers.

[@kalderify]

"Every mutable buffer sequence is also a const buffer sequence. So that's that" No wonder c++ is as dead as glam rock.