What is hyper?

hyper is a popular asynchronous web framework for Rust. It's known for its speed, flexibility, and low-level control, making it a good choice for building high-performance network applications.

Key aspects of hyper include:

  • HTTP Client and Server: hyper provides the tools to build both HTTP clients (making requests) and HTTP servers (handling requests). This dual capability makes it very versatile.

  • Asynchronous I/O: Leveraging Rust's async/await features, hyper is built on asynchronous I/O. This allows it to handle a large number of concurrent connections efficiently, without blocking threads. See more about Asynchronous I/O.

  • Low-Level Control: hyper exposes a significant amount of control over the HTTP protocol, enabling fine-tuning and customization for specific use cases. This includes managing HTTP Headers and HTTP Methods.

  • Composable Abstractions: hyper offers abstractions that allow developers to easily compose different parts of the HTTP stack, such as request routing, middleware, and more.

  • Performance: Designed for speed, hyper aims to minimize overhead and maximize throughput. Its efficiency is often cited as a key advantage.

  • Integration with Tokio: Hyper heavily relies on the Tokio asynchronous runtime for its underlying I/O operations. Tokio is the defacto standard async runtime in Rust.

  • Extensible: You can implement your own bodies and streams in hyper to take control of HTTP message processing.