History or Websocat redesigns

Websocat started in 2016. In 2018 I decided that it's time to call it 1.0.0.

Eventually it has became my most popular project, so I keep extending and maintaining it.

However, v1.0.0 is based on legacy dependencies and does not use async/await (and has some other inconvenient design decisions), so I started redesigning it. It took multiple attempts to find the way I am satisfied with, but even abandoned attempts provided good educational value.

Fortunately, Websocat v1 remained maintained all the way through this experimentation.

0.4

Sync version, used thread per data transfer direction. Used websocket crate, clap for CLI.

1.0

Based on tokio-core, later on Tokio v0.1. Specifier stacks, using dyn-based pluggable overlays and address types. Locked to single async IO thread only. Uses Rc<RefCell> a lot. Iffy error handing. Still uses websocket crate.

2.0

Attempt to upgrade to Tokio 0.3 (and later Tokio 1.0) and Hyper 0.14 and make it multi-crate. Attempt to migrate websocket crate from hyper 0.10 to hyper 0.14.

Abandoned attempts to make arch saner incrementally.

3.0

"Second-system" edition.

Based on Tokio 1.0 from the beginning, based on tokio-tungstenite. Custom CLI framework, custom lisp-esque low-level specifier language (there is even a quasi-quote operator inside). Playground for rolling my own proc macros.

Even reached an alpha Github release, but I after thinking about flexibility and complexity and memory allocations I decided to count it as educational efforts and move on.