Downloading HTTP URLs asynchronously in C++

Question

What's a good way to download HTTP URLs (e.g. such as http://0.0.0.0/foo.htm ) in C++ on Linux ? I strongly prefer something asynchronous. My program will have an event loop that repeatedly initiates multiple (very small) downloads and acts on them when they finish (either by polling or being notified somehow). I would rather not have to spawn multiple threads/processes to accomplish this. That shouldn't be necessary.

Should I look into libraries like libcurl? I suppose I could implement it manually with non-blocking TCP sockets and select() calls, but that would likely be less convenient.

Answer 1

You can use boost::asio to perform async IO operations. Heres an example of an async http client.