.. title: Announcing contagiousbt-bencode
.. slug: announcing-contagiousbt-bencode
.. date: 2017-05-16 21:38:29 UTC
.. tags: announcement, bencode, bittorrent, c++, library
.. category: 
.. link: 
.. description: 
.. type: text

In this short blog post (my first "real" one, actually) I would like to
announce the initial release of
`contagiousbt-bencode <https://gitlab.com/outputenable/bencode>`__, a
lightweight modular C++ library for reading/decoding data in
`Bencode <https://wiki.theory.org/index.php/BitTorrentSpecification#Bencoding>`__
format.
I develop this library as a component for my
`BitTorrent <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent>`__ client in the making
(**contagiousBT**, obviously---don't hold your breath though), but since it
turned out quite nicely I decided to go ahead with publishing it as a
standalone project now.

contagiousbt-bencode comes with a couple of unit tests and even code coverage,
although both are far from complete and for the time being the latter is more
or less experimental in nature.
Documentation is still lacking quite a bit, too, but I hope that the APIs are
simple and straightforward enough to not make this carry too much weight.
All in all the library could do with some (more) polish, but I'm not aware of
any serious issues.
As mentioned above, for now the project primarily (not to say exclusively)
caters to my own needs.
That doesn't mean it shouldn't evolve.
I plan to maintain it for the foreseeable future and welcome comments or
constructive criticism.

So, without any further ado head on over to the
`Git lab <https://gitlab.com>`__ and take a look at the
`bencode project repository <https://gitlab.com/outputenable/bencode>`__; the
`README <https://gitlab.com/outputenable/bencode/blob/master/README.md>`__
seems like a good place to start your exploration.
If you would rather see some code *using* the library, there's an
`example showing how to compute the infohash <https://gitlab.com/outputenable/bencode/blob/master/examples/infohash.cpp>`__
of a ``.torrent`` file.