zttp 0.0.3

A sans-IO HTTP parser for Python with a Zig core.

zttp

[!WARNING] zttp is experimental. The API and behaviour may change at any time, and it is not yet ready for production use.

A sans-IO HTTP parser for Python, with a core written in Zig. It is to h11 what zloop is to asyncio: the same clean, event-based API, with a hand-written Zig engine underneath - fast enough to be usable as the HTTP/1.1 parser in uvicorn.

Sans-IO

zttp does no I/O. You feed it bytes and pull out events; you ask it for bytes to send. It never touches a socket. This is the h11 model:

import zttp

conn = zttp.Connection(zttp.SERVER)
conn.receive_data(b"GET /path?q=1 HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: example.com\r\n\r\n")

conn.next_event()   # Request(method=b'GET', target=b'/path?q=1', http_version=b'1.1', headers=[(b'Host', b'example.com')])
conn.next_event()   # EndOfMessage(trailers=[])
conn.next_event()   # NEED_DATA

# Build a response:
conn.send_response(b"1.1", 200, b"OK", [(b"Content-Length", b"5")])
conn.send_data(b"hello")
conn.end_message()
conn.data_to_send()  # b'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\nContent-Length: 5\r\n\r\nhello'

The read side yields Request / Response / Data / EndOfMessage, or the NEED_DATA sentinel when more bytes are required. The write side serializes a head, body data, and the end of the message, framing the body (Content-Length or chunked) for you.

Performance

Against httptools and h11 on the same requests (macOS arm64, CPython 3.14, ReleaseFast), all three verified to extract identical data:

Workload	zttp	httptools	h11	zttp vs httptools
Simple GET	~1.25M req/s	~880k req/s	~57k req/s	1.41x
POST + JSON body	~6.7M req/s	~1.84M req/s	~616k req/s	3.62x

Run it yourself: uv run --group bench python bench.py.

Why it is fast

• A SWAR newline scanner and comptime-built character-class tables in the Zig core, so the hot loops are branch-light array lookups.
• The body is emitted as a single Data event slicing the parse buffer, rather than copied per callback the way httptools does.
• The header list is built directly in Zig as list[tuple[bytes, bytes]], with no per-header Python callback.

Correctness & security

The core enforces the framing rules of RFC 9112 §6 against request smuggling: the Content-Length / Transfer-Encoding conflict, duplicate-Content-Length checks, and combining multiple Transfer-Encoding field-lines into one ordered list so chunked must be the sole, final coding. Line endings are strict CRLF by default (bare LF is rejected), chunk-size is strictly 1*HEXDIG, and obsolete line folding is rejected. Header blocks, trailers, and the receive buffer are all bounded (Limits) so a malicious peer cannot exhaust memory, and the outbound serializer rejects CR/LF/control bytes to prevent response splitting. The build defaults to Zig's safety-checked ReleaseSafe mode. Malformed input raises RemoteProtocolError; misusing the send API raises LocalProtocolError.

The parser has been through two adversarial security audits (a code review and a CVE-driven review against real HTTP-parser CVEs across Node, Go, Python, Rust, and C servers); zig build fuzz runs the adversarial-input net over the core. See THREAT_MODEL.md for what zttp defends against and what the integrator is responsible for.

Roadmap

• HTTP/1.1 - request and response parsing, chunked transfer-coding, trailers, keep-alive, the bidirectional connection state machine. (done)
• Connection state policy - h11-parity state machine guards on the read side (reject body bytes after a close, enforce request/response pairing).
• uvicorn integration - an HttpToolsProtocol-style adapter so uvicorn can use zttp unchanged.
• HTTP/2 - HPACK + frame layer in the Zig core, same event API.
• HTTP/3 - QPACK + the QUIC-side framing, same event API.

Status

Alpha. The HTTP/1.1 parser and serializer are implemented and tested; the API may still change.

License

BSD-3-Clause.