GSoC 2020 Project: Improving and Extending Services Kit
It’s pretty long overdue for the post, but here I am.
Introduction:
I’m Leorize, a past GCI participant and a former active member of HaikuPorts.
If you hang around the #haiku IRC channel, chances are that you might know me
:)
I started contributing to Haiku around 2017, when I joined GCI. Since then,
I’ve authored many bug fixes and ports, including some notable ports like
libuv, mandoc, pkgconf, and pyqt.
This year, I’m excited to be selected as a GSoC mentee! You may have noticed that a lot of my work were mainly focused on the developer side of things, so this year, I’m looking at improving the user experience on Haiku.
About the project:
My project revolves around Services Kit. For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s the application networking library that powers many of the applications that you may use: HaikuDepot, WebPositive, Weather…
This project aims to improve the performance/reliability of Services Kit, to introduce better support for HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 (which should result in a huge uplift in Web+ performance), to add support for more Internet protocols (like FTP), and to make Services Kit easier to use for developers.
Project plan:
I am spending a lot of time researching and experimenting with different designs for Services Kit to iron out any bottlenecks. The plan as of now is:
- Further evaluate the API design for inefficiencies
- Currently we decided to stick to the current threading-based design.
- I’m looking into possible overhead associated with having to serialize
the received data into
BMessages.
- Implement HTTP/1.1 support.
- Also get proxies implemented.
- Implement FTP support.
- Give the documentation a nice touchup.
Work done so far:
- Built the overhead benchmark suite: https://github.com/alaviss/haiku-net-bench
- This suite will slowly expand as more and more benchmarks are written.
