03 — Hand-Rolled HTTP/1.1

Context sources: ./02-event-loop-epoll.md, ./linux/00-linux.md, ../02-recovery.md.

Goal

A non-blocking HTTP/1.1 server module that accepts connections, parses requests, and writes responses, driven by the phase-02 EventLoop — no axum, no hyper, no tokio. Still additive: the existing axum router keeps serving wo run until phase 04 cuts over.

Design decisions (locked)

HTTP/1.1 only, keep-alive supported. HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are not on the roadmap for Stage 2 — they need ALPN / TLS support we don't have a plan for yet. HTTP/1.1 covers every endpoint the blog + ecommerce samples exercise.
Per-connection state machine. Each accepted socket fd is registered on the event loop with its own Connection { state: Reading | Writing | Idle, parser, pending_response }. Edge-triggered EPOLLIN/EPOLLOUT drive state transitions. Matches v1 wo-http's model verbatim.
Router is pattern-matched at registration. Router::new().route("/api/articles/:id", Method::GET, handler) resolves to a trie at boot. Per-request dispatch is a single trie walk — no axum-style type-erased layers.
Handlers are fn(&Request, &Engine) -> Response. Synchronous. The single-threaded event loop means a handler blocking is a bug; each handler must be a pure transformation over engine state.
Module, not crate (yet). Lives at crates/rt/src/http/ with the same "extract when a second consumer shows up" rule as phase 02. The eventual home is the empty crates/http/ sibling — but not in this phase. Paired with phase 02's crates/rt/src/runtime/ (Go-style naming — netpoll_epoll.rs, eventfd.rs, …) which this module depends on for the EventLoop + raw syscall shims. Go's src/net/http/ and src/runtime/ split is the layout precedent; see reference/go/src/net/http/.

Scope

New files inside `crates/rt/src/http/`

File	Responsibility	Port source
`mod.rs`	Re-exports `Listener`, `Connection`, `Request`, `Response`, `Router`, `Method`, `Status`	`reference/crates/wo-http/src/lib.rs` (4 LOC)
`listener.rs`	`Listener { fd }` wrapping `socket + bind + listen + accept4(SOCK_NONBLOCK \| SOCK_CLOEXEC)`; integrates with `EventLoop`	`reference/crates/wo-http/src/listener.rs` (202 LOC)
`connection.rs`	Per-fd state machine: drain request bytes, parse, dispatch, drain response bytes, keep-alive or close	`reference/crates/wo-http/src/connection.rs` (202 LOC)
`request.rs`	Incremental HTTP/1.1 request parser: request line, headers, optional body. `Content-Length` only (no chunked request bodies in Stage 2 — they don't appear in the samples)	`reference/crates/wo-http/src/request.rs` (158 LOC)
`response.rs`	Response builder + writer: status line, headers, body (fixed or chunked)	`reference/crates/wo-http/src/response.rs` (110 LOC)
`route.rs`	Trie-based router: static paths + `:param` segments. `Router::route(method, path, handler) -> Router`	`reference/crates/wo-route/src/router.rs` (127 LOC) + `pattern.rs` (146 LOC)

Total: ~949 LOC ported. Most of it is mechanical adaptation from v1; the namespace + the Interest enum change from phase 02 are the only non-trivial edits.

`Cargo.toml` change

None. libc already in from phase 02 covers the raw syscalls.

API shape (target)

use rt::event::EventLoop;
use rt::http::{Listener, Router, Method, Status, Response};

let mut loop_ = EventLoop::new()?;
let router   = Router::new()
    .route(Method::GET, "/healthz",          |_req, _eng| Response::ok().body("ok"))
    .route(Method::GET, "/api/articles",     list_articles)
    .route(Method::GET, "/api/articles/:id", get_article)
    .route(Method::POST,"/api/articles",     create_article);

let listener = Listener::bind("127.0.0.1:8080")?;
loop_.register(listener.as_raw_fd(), Interest::READABLE, Token::LISTENER)?;

let mut conns: HashMap<RawFd, Connection> = HashMap::new();
loop {
    for ev in loop_.wait_once(None)? {
        match ev.token() {
            Token::LISTENER => {
                while let Some(stream) = listener.accept_nonblocking()? {
                    let fd = stream.as_raw_fd();
                    loop_.register(fd, Interest::READABLE, Token::CONN(fd))?;
                    conns.insert(fd, Connection::new(stream));
                }
            }
            Token::CONN(fd) => {
                conns.get_mut(&fd).unwrap().drive(ev, &router, &engine)?;
                if conns[&fd].is_closed() { conns.remove(&fd); }
            }
            _ => {}
        }
    }
}

Exit criteria

A test binary crates/rt/src/bin/http-smoke.rs ([[bin]] name = "http-smoke" in rt/Cargo.toml) binds on 127.0.0.1:0 (auto-assigned port), registers routes for /healthz, /echo/:name, /counter, and services them via the phase-02 event loop.
An integration test (also in crates/rt/tests/http_smoke.rs or similar) spawns the binary, sends three curl equivalents using std::net::TcpStream, validates status codes and bodies.
All 14 existing rt tests still pass.
wo run docs/examples/blog unchanged — axum path still drives the real CLI.
cargo build at root; cd reference/crates && cargo build still green.

Non-scope

No TLS. Deferred. When it lands, it's a wrapper around Connection that read/writes through rustls or (ideally) kTLS. Not this phase.
No HTTP/2. See design decision 1.
No chunked request bodies. Every sample's POST /api/X uses Content-Length. If a future sample needs chunked, it's a small extension to request.rs.
No middleware. axum's tower::Layer idiom has no direct analog. Cross-cutting concerns (logging, auth) live in the handler or in a wrapper fn — phase 04 re-integrates with the existing axum state handling when the cutover happens.
Not wired into the wo binary yet. That's phase 04.

Verification

cargo build                               # root workspace compiles
cargo test --bin http-smoke               # the bundled test binary
cargo test --lib                          # 14 existing rt tests still green
cargo run --bin wo -- run docs/examples/blog   # axum path unchanged

After this phase

Phase 04 takes the same in-memory Engine that the axum router serves and points the phase-03 router at it instead. Removing tokio, axum, tower is a consequence; the behaviour visible to reference/rest/blog.rest does not change.

6.9 KiB Raw Blame History