seanmonstar

hyper v1

I’m excited to announce v1.0 of hyper, a protective and efficient HTTP library written in the Rust programming language. hyper provides asynchronous HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 server and client APIs, allowing you to bring your own IO and runtime.

It’s been exciting and humbling to watch users build awesome things. Cloudflare uses hyper within Oxy, its next generation proxy framework to handle traffic at considerable scale. After Discord’s 5x improvement to @mention response times a few years ago, they have moved most of their critical systems to depend on Rust and hyper. curl has a currently experimental HTTP backend built on hyper with the goal of making the Internet safer.

Marc Brooker, a Distinguished Engineer at AWS, commented:

When building our new container-loading data plane for AWS Lambda, we expected to need a custom binary protocol. In production, we’ve found the overhead of hyper to be SO low that we are excited for it to continue powering our services.

Johan Andersson, CTO at Embark, said:

We have been using and relying on hyper for the last 5 years for our gRPC and REST services, tools, libraries, and embedded in our next game built in Rust. It has been rock solid across all of our usages, and it really is a foundational library for the Rust ecosystem. Congrats on 1.0!

The best way to get started is to check out the guide.

Stability here we come

Over the past 9 years, hyper has grown from a web developer’s side project into a solid library powering huge network applications. It’s time to grow up. After bringing async/await support in v0.14, we focused on providing a set of basic APIs that would keep hyper safe, fast, and flexible. This meant removing some of the more opinionated “higher level” pieces. Those belong elsewhere, like hyper-util, reqwest, Axum.

This release signals some stability. Major versions, like 1.0, are stable for at least 3 years.¹ We also keep a MSRV that is at least 6 months old.² We’ll add new features, and we still have a couple places to experiment: in the hyper-util crate, and hyper_unstable compiler flags.

Starting in v0.14.25, we added a backports feature which brings the new core APIs to you immediately. Combine that with the deprecated feature, and you’ll be guided to making your existing code ready for the upgrade to 1.0. Be sure to check out the upgrade guide!

Next

The most immediate next steps are to update the other core parts of the ecosystem that depend on hyper: reqwest, Axum, Tonic. But after that, there’s plenty more to do. You’re welcome to come join us!

HTTP/3

I would like this to be my next focus. We’ve been building up the h3 crate, and reqwest has unstable support now. I’d like to stabilize the feature in reqwest, and explore how we can make it available in hyper directly. Then we can have easy HTTP/3 servers, too!

The trickiest question is making it available without being tied to a TLS/QUIC library. Then, users could choose to use quinn, or s2n-quic, or msquic, or any other.

Stabilize in curl

The biggest parts of making hyper work in curl are done. Someone with experience in Rust and C could make a huge dent in Internet safety helping to get it over the finish line.

Middleware

There’s some excellent middleware available already in tower and tower-http. But several of the important ones are just a little (or a lottle) too difficult to add to a stack. I’d also love for there to be some recommended stacks for servers and clients, that bundle together the right middleware that most people would need. To that end, I’ve mentioned before breaking open reqwest such that all of its features are middleware you can customize.

Tracing and Metrics

It’s possible to currently get a decent set of logs using tower_http::trace. It’d be better if you could get more fine-grained traces and metrics. Probably with some stabilized integration with tracing directly in hyper. Maybe some sort of hyper-metrics, similar to tokio-metrics.

io_uring

Part of the reason we made hyper have its own IO traits was to be able to adapt them for completion-based IO. I believe having decent support and benchmarks could be had pretty soon, by a motivated individual.

Thanks

A huge thank you to all our amazing contributors. You’ve made this project the success it is, and helped move hyper along the journey to 1.0. I’d like to follow up with a separate post specifically thanking you all.

Thanks to the companies who have sponsored the creation of hyper: AWS, Buoyant, Mozilla, Rust Foundation, Fly.io, Embark and others.

Your company could also become a sponsor or get support!