Beginner tutorial building an IRC client

[ultrasaurus]

Concept: create IRC bot that connects to gitter

IRC is a very simple line-based protocol, we should be able to build a bot with a subset of the full-protocol (5-6 commands)

Draft sequence of steps:

1. Connect to the server
2. Send/Receive IRC messages
3. bot says Hello
4. bot respond to question
5. no channel activity for certain amount of time, say "is anyone here?"

Key concepts - tcp socket, streams, reading and writing, framed codec, async, futures - canonical timeout & action

References

• building an IRC bot in Python

[ultrasaurus]

working on ideas for this tutorial here: https://github.com/ultrasaurus/irc-tokio

[ultrasaurus]

I've made a bit of progress, would love feedback, details in the repo README for now. Will work on figuring out what open questions I have and looking for answers or filing issues.

My biggest question is how to test something that uses a TcpStream. The tokio repo doesn't seem to have examples of that. Probably should structure the code differently to make it testable.

[Ralith]

Abstracting over AsyncRead + AsyncWrite is the usual advice there.