The first stable release of the nghttp3 project, which develops a C library implementing the HTTP/3 protocol, is now available. The HTTP/2 variant developed by the same project serves as the basis for the mod_http2 module included in the Apache HTTP server. The project's developments are also utilized in the Curl utility. The library's code is distributed under the MIT license.
The HTTP/3 standard defines the use of the QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) protocol as the transport for HTTP/2. QUIC is built on top of the UDP protocol, supporting multiplexing of multiple connections and providing encryption methods equivalent to TLS/SSL. It was created in 2013 by Google as an alternative to the TCP+TLS combination for the Web, addressing long connection setup and handshake times in TCP and eliminating delays from packet loss during data transmission.
The nghttp3 library provides an independent implementation of the specifications RFC 9114 (HTTP/3 over QUIC), RFC 920 (header compression technology QPACK), RFC 9220 (WebSocket transmission over HTTP/3), and RFC 9218 (an extensible scheme for managing response prioritization to client requests). The library is not dependent on specific QUIC stacks and supports operation over different implementations of the QUIC transport protocol. Additionally, the project develops its own QUIC protocol implementation — ngtcp2, which is used by default. For data encryption backends in ngtcp2, support is provided for quictls, GnuTLS, BoringSSL, Picotls, and wolfSSL. Alongside nghttp3 1.0, the first stable release of ngtcp2 1.0 has also been published.
Source: opennet.ru
