Re: Emacs HTTP libraries [was: Re: How to contribute new package to GNU ELPA?]

[Helmut Eller]

On Sun, Dec 20 2020, Stefan Monnier wrote:

>> Emacs definitely needs an alternative to url.el.  It has some issues
>> that are not easily solved nor worked around, such as potentially
>> calling callbacks multiple times[0], requests not timing out, and some
>> of its API being in the form of undocumented variables that must be
>> let-bound around calls to its functions.
>
> We should improve the API, indeed.  Would you be interested in working
> on that?
>
> Extra bonus points if we can write a simple "`request` emulation layer"
> on top of it ;-)
>
> We should also fix the bugs: the multiple callbacks issue shouldn't be
> hard to trackdown and fix.

I think it's worth looking at the fetch API[1] for inspiration.
Especially using Javascript-like promises consistently would help.  Many
people will be familiar with the Javascript API and it's just a lot
easier to steal a (non-perfect) design than to come up with something
better.

Helmut

[1] https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/#fetch-api