oboard/reqbest

A MoonBit HTTP networking library with native HTTP/1.1, experimental HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 transports, and JavaScript Fetch support.

⚡ Blazing fast: reqbest is the fastest HTTP client in our cross-runtime benchmark — 21,585 requests/sec, ahead of Go, Rust hyper, Bun, and Node.js.

Features

• 🚀 Async support: Request APIs are async on native and JavaScript targets.
• 🌐 HTTP methods: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH, OPTIONS, HEAD, CONNECT, and TRACE are represented by RequestMethod.
• 📄 Response helpers: Read response bodies as binary, text, or JSON.
• 🌊 Streaming HTTP/1.1: Native stream APIs expose request/response bodies through @io.Reader and @io.Writer.
• 📦 Compression: Native responses can decode gzip, deflate, br, and zstd content encodings.
• 🎯 Multi-backend: Native uses MoonBit transports; JavaScript uses the platform Fetch implementation.
• 🔧 Builder options: Configure default headers, timeout, protocol mode, proxy, and certificate verification.

Installation

Add to your moon.mod.json:

moon add oboard/reqbest

Quick Start

Basic GET Request

let response = @reqbest.get("https://api.github.com") catch {
    Err(e) => println("Error: " + e.to_string())
}
println("Response: " + response.text())

Request Builder

///|
let client = @reqbest.RequestClient::builder()
  .default_header("User-Agent", "reqbest")
  .timeout(10000)
  .build()

///|
let response = client
  .post("https://api.example.com/items")
  .json({ "name": "moonbit" })
  .send()

HTTP/2 Prior Knowledge

///|
let client = @reqbest.RequestClient::builder()
  .http2_prior_knowledge()
  .timeout(10000)
  .build()

///|
let response = client.get("http://localhost:3000/").send()
println(response.text())

HTTP/3 Prior Knowledge

///|
let client = @reqbest.RequestClient::builder()
  .http3_prior_knowledge()
  .timeout(10000)
  .build()

///|
let response = client.get("https://example.com/").send()
println(response.text())

danger_accept_invalid_certs(true) disables certificate and hostname verification. It is intended for local testing only.

Protocol Support

Mode	Native status	Notes
HTTP/1.1	Supported	Direct TCP/TLS transport with streaming APIs.
HTTP/2	Experimental	Prior-knowledge client, HPACK, SETTINGS/HEADERS/DATA, PING, WINDOW_UPDATE, and GOAWAY handling.
HTTP/3	Experimental	UDP QUIC path with X25519, TLS 1.3 ServerHello, EncryptedExtensions, Finished, QUIC Retry, Handshake ACKs, H3 SETTINGS, request streams, and response decoding.
JavaScript	Runtime-managed	Uses Fetch; protocol negotiation is handled by the host runtime.

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are currently single-request transports. They do not yet provide a hyper-style connection task, connection pooling, multiplexed request scheduling, broad retransmission/loss recovery, or full certificate-chain validation.

Hyper Comparison

hyper separates an established connection into a request sender and a connection future that continuously drives protocol state. reqbest currently keeps HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 as compact single-request loops. The implementation is moving toward the same separation of concerns:

• request construction is handled by RequestClient and RequestBuilder;
• protocol-specific transports live in HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 modules;
• connection state such as QUIC packet number spaces, Retry handling, and TLS transcript state is kept below the request API.

Unlike hyper, this package includes a MoonBit-native experimental QUIC/TLS 1.3/HTTP/3 path. That path is intentionally conservative and still needs more transport work before it should be treated as production-ready.

Benchmarks

Sequential HTTP/1.1 GET requests against a local server (128-byte payload, 10,000 requests, 200 warmup). Higher is better.

Runtime	Requests/sec
reqbest	21,585
Go	16,146
hyper (Rust)	14,540
Bun	13,451
Node.js	8,517

Run it yourself:

node benchmarks/scripts/run-http-client-bench.mjs --requests 10000 --warmup 200

Contributing

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add amazing feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
5. Open a Pull Request

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 - see the LICENSE file for details.