SDL RWops extension that allow us to fetch data from the web

[SDLBugzilla]

This bug report was migrated from our old Bugzilla tracker.

Reported in version: unspecified
Reported for operating system, platform: Linux, x86_64

Comments on the original bug report:

On 2019-03-01 14:04:29 +0000, Sylvain wrote:

Not familiar with SDL_net, but this seems interesting:

SDL_rwhttp is a small SDL RWops extension that allow us to fetch data from the web.

Currently it supports either libcurl or SDL_net.

https://github.com/mgerhardy/SDL_rwhttp

[madebr]

I think this would be a good use case for a future async i/o api.
libsdl-org/SDL#10605

[icculus]

So building out something that works well with HTTP requests will make you understand why libcurl has been in active development for decades. Even before you get into HTTP/2, and eventually HTTP/3 and QUIC, there's an enormous amount of functionality and complexity (and workarounds for implementation misbehavior) even in the early simplistic HTTP protocols.

And, of course, there's encryption, because so much of the web is now useless with "http://" requests, for better or worse. Mostly better! Occasionally worse.

What we ended up doing in DragonRuby Game Toolkit was building something that talks to the system APIs for making HTTP requests (so it was WinHTTP on windows, Cocoa's NSURLSession for mac/ios, the Fetch API for Emscripten, and java.net.HttpURLConnection through JNI for Android...and everything else tries to load a system-installed copy of libcurl.

It is pretty ugly code, but it works surprisingly well and doesn't add much bloat to the binary, since all the actual complexity exists in system-installed libraries.

Adding something akin to this would be useful; the intention with SDL_net is to smooth over some low-level details, and maybe eventually roll our own dependency-free protocol support to help gaming, but there's probably huge value in solving the "I just need to make a web request" problem without a lot of complexity or bloat.