chttp

chttp is an HTTP client & server library for C.

Why another HTTP library?

This is my attempt at solving the "HTTP problem" for the C language. Writing C programs that behave as or interact with web services is always more painful than necessary in C. You either need to use libcurl which is overkill in most situations or link a large scale web servers to serve simple pages. This library targets smaller scale use-cases and tries to be as nice as possible to work with. Even then, it is fast. No performance is left on the table unless there is a specific reason. And if you do want to work at larger scales by using more sophisticate I/O systems (io_uring, I/O completion ports, etc) you can reuse the core state machine of the library that is I/O independant.

I would be comfortable with chttp handling up to 1000 simultaneous connections. For anything more than that I would reuse chttp's I/O independant state machine with my own multi-threaded and more scalable I/O.

Features & Limitations

HTTP/1.1 server & client
Cross-platform (Windows & Linux)
TLS (HTTPS) support using OpenSSL
Minimal dependencies (libc and OpenSSL)
Non-blocking design based on poll()
I/O independant core reusable with more sophisticated I/O models
Virtual hosts
Single-threaded