Facebook open sources Proxygen, C++ HTTP framework + server

After having open sourced the OS analysis tool osquery a week ago, Facebook has announced on Wednesday that Proxygen – a collection of C++ HTTP libraries and an easy-to-use HTTP server – is getting the same treatment.

“Proxygen is not designed to replace Apache or nginx — those projects focus on building extremely flexible HTTP servers written in C that offer good performance but almost overwhelming amounts of configurability,” software engineers Daniel Sommermann and Alan Frindell explained.

“Instead, we focused on building a high performance C++ HTTP framework with sensible defaults that includes both server and client code and that’s easy to integrate into existing applications. We want to help more people build and deploy high performance C++ HTTP services, and we believe that Proxygen is a great framework to do so.”

The project to develop Proxygen was started in 2011, and has now reached a point where Facebook is ready to share it with the public and accept inputs from outside developers.

“If you are passionate about HTTP, high performance networking code, and modern C++, we would be excited to work with you,” the engineers said and invited contributors to send in pull requests on GitHub.

Facebook has a good track record of open sourcing code for public use. For more information about all the open source projects started by the company, go here.