During the formal review of Beast, desires were expressed to use components like the HTTP parser and serializer independently from the rest of the library. The sticking point was the abstraction used to represent a range of non-owning buffers. In particular, Asio imposes certain concrete type requirements in its ConstBufferSequence and MutableBufferSequence concepts. It would seem there is significant interest in making some components of Beast modular, in their own libraries. The main feature of these components would be that they should not require Boost.Asio. Unfortunately, the way Asio's concepts are defined this is not possible. Two solutions present themselves: 1. Create a new buffer sequence concept which retains all the features of Asio's concepts but does not require the concrete types. While this is possible it would create a significant complication. Interfaces which use the new concept would require some kind of adapter at every call site that tries to use a traditional Asio style interface. 2. Create a new library which uses conditional compilation to either include just the Asio header files which fulfill the needs for interacting with buffer sequence concepts, or provide the declarations directly from a copy of the Asio sources. The solution used in Boost.Buffers (a new library I am considering proposing) is choice number two. Someone who wants to create a new library ("Foo") that does no network I/O but wants to interoperate with Asio buffer concepts merely need to do the following #include and then, in their build script for the tests and examples, set: #define BOOST_NET_BUFFER_NO_ASIO 1 This works because Boost.Buffers contains copies of all the necessary header files to work with buffer sequences, and JUST those header files. All of Boost.Asio is not necessary: https://github.com/vinniefalco/buffers/blob/30ef7031ec0909972a720c0cdd8d6c6e... Now if someone wants to use library Foo they will also be getting a dependency on Boost.Buffers. If that user doesn't need Asio, then they will also set the macro to 1 in their build script. However. if that user wants to use Asio in their program or library, they just set #define BOOST_NET_BUFFER_NO_ASIO 0 and now Boost.Buffers will simply include the relevant Asio header files. This library will allow the creation of new libraries which use Asio buffer concepts, but do not require all of Boost.Asio as a dependency, as well as all the things that Boost.Asio is dependent on, which is non-trivial as can be seen here: https://github.com/boostorg/beast/blob/develop/.travis.yml#L140 I would like feedback on this library before I move forward with it, as you can imagine it has some controversial aspects to it. Boost.Buffers is here: https://github.com/vinniefalco/buffers Thanks