[ANN] h2: An HTTP/2 implementation for OCaml

Dear fellow OCamlers,

I’m pleased to announce the product of a few months of work: an HTTP/2 implementation written entirely in OCaml: h2.

h2 is based on the concepts in http/af, using Angstrom and Faraday for the parsing and serialization of the HTTP/2 framing layer, respectively. It also preserves the same API as http/af wherever possible, for familiarity reasons. The notable exception is the addition of a Reqd.push function that implements the HTTP/2 server push functionality.

h2 currently provides a server implementation, as well as runtime implementations for Lwt (UNIX) and Mirage (which I implemented at the last Mirage Hack Retreat in Marrakech).

The repo for h2 is here. The packages are not yet released to OPAM, a task I’m planning to complete in the next few days.

Happy to hear any feedback / answer questions here or in Github issues (https://github.com/anmonteiro/ocaml-h2/issues).

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This is a game changer, thank you!

I’m happy that you found and used my hpack implementation, but why did you remove the copyright notice and license?

Apologies, this was a total oversight on my part. I’ve reproduced the license for your original work in the repository.

There were some licensing issues in this work related to oversights and ignorance on my part. I’m copying a text from a Reddit post of mine that tries to clarify the situation below.

Thanks everyone who brought all the licensing issues to my attention.

To clarify: I never intended to “steal” any code, I.e. passing work as mine without proper attribution to the original authors. The truth is that, while I’ve been doing open source for a little while, this is the first time that I’ve done any derivative work, and not being a lawyer, I really had no idea what exactly I needed to do (my thought process being that if my code didn’t bear any resemblance at all to the original code then I wouldn’t need to preserve the copyright headers).

It has been brought to my attention that I was wrong and I have therefore rectified the situation.

To clarify further what h2 is in comparison to http/af: h2 is an implementation of HTTP/2 (a totally different protocol) that tries to share the http/af types and API wherever possible. I understand now that this is derivative work because it shares the same underlying architecture, but I didn’t know that coming into it at first.

To all the affected parties: my apologies, I hope you can forgive me.

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Would it be possible to merge this and httpaf to have a single server supporting both http and http/2?

They are different protocols, so merging them isn’t appropriate. What’s a better way is to use the TLS ALPN extension to provide a multiplexing layer between http1/2, since this is what browsers use to distinguish between the different protocol versions while negotiating a secure connection at the moment. Then, we will need to design common abstractions between http/1/2/3 and dispatch to each of the individual protocol libraries depending on which one is chosen dynamically.

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