Damian's June Update

By Damian Jarek on

Jul 14, 2019

This month I’ve been working on the following projects:

• Certify
• Boost.Beast

Certify

After quite a bit of work exploring ways to make certificate verification more complete, I’ve concluded that Boost is currently missing a few tools to make that viable. A comprehensive solution requires, at the very least, a functional HTTP client able to handle higher-level semantics like redirects, proxies or compressed bodies. While these are unlikely to happen while performing an OCSP query or downloading a CRL set from Google’s update service, they still need to be handled, otherwise the user will be left in a no better state than when no library is used. At this point, Certify only offers basic verification, but that is still simillar level to what cURL does. Providing a comprehensive solution will require either a infrastructure solution (something like Google’s CRLsets) or a library based one (i.e. build up all the required libraries to be able to perform proper certificate status checks).

Boost.Beast

I’ve continued the work on expanding split compilation in Beast, by turning some internal function templates, in websocket code, into regular functions. Additionally, I’ve simplified the websocket prng code after proving with some benchmarks that the previous solution made it worse both for the fast case (with TLS enabled) and the slow one. The speed up is marginal, but it made the code much simpler and reduced the size of binaries by small amount (a few K at best). I’ve also worked to cleaning up some of the compilation warnings that I found using the new Azure Piepelines CI in Beast. I also had to deal with an an odd case of miscompilation under MSVC 14.2 (x64 Release), where the use of static_string<7> failed tests with paritally garbage output while static_string<8> succeeded.