h2o/picohttpparser

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

2103 stars · 273 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

PicoHTTPParser is a tiny, fast HTTP request/response parser written in C. It is stateless and allocation-free, setting pointers into the caller's buffer instead of copying data, and is widely embedded in projects like H2O and Perl modules such as Plack and Starman.

Use cases

• parse http requests in c
• fast zero-allocation http parser
• parse http response headers
• decode chunked transfer encoding
• embed http parsing in a server
• incremental parsing of partial http data

When to choose

• you need a minimal, extremely fast HTTP/1 parser in C or C++
• you want zero memory allocations and stateless parsing
• you need incremental parsing of data arriving in chunks
• you are building a high-performance HTTP server or client

When to avoid

• you need HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 support
• you want a high-level API that allocates parsed structures for you
• you need a parser in a higher-level language without C bindings
• you require a permissive license with an explicit file (licensing is dual Perl/MIT but no dedicated LICENSE file)

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser http-server http-client web-development backend apis performance cpp c cross-platform windows http http-parser zero-allocation stateless c-library http1 chunked-encoding linux macos

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