FYI This breaks compilation on Win64devkit. httplib does not compile correctly there.

Example of errors:

undefined reference to `__imp_setsockopt'
undefined reference to `__imp_freeaddrinfo'
undefined reference to `__imp_WSACleanup'
undefined reference to `WSAPoll'
undefined reference to `__imp_shutdown'

I would strongly suggest not forcing httplib to be used on all builds. It is possible that there are other environments that it does not work either.

@LostRuins do you also build libcommon and llama-server?

It seems to me that httplib will always be built after this PR. We should only build httplib if any parts of the project depends on it.

@ngxson it's an unfortunate long dependency chain that requires httplib

I just want to build completion.exe -> so I build build completion.cpp -> which requires arg.cpp (for the launch params) -> which requires download.cpp (for definitions of common_download_file_single -> which now requires httplib.cpp (previously is ok because I can disable LLAMA_USE_HTTPLIB)

So, how can I build completion.exe without httplib?

Hi @LostRuins, thanks for reporting the issue.

This seems to be specific to the Win64devkit build configuration, as cpp-httplib compiles and works on Windows.
I believe it is a very simple issue to fix, and might be related to this code:

if (WIN32 AND NOT MSVC)
    target_link_libraries(${TARGET} PRIVATE ws2_32)
endif()

Made a PR, let see if the CI is happy

I still think it would be better for the httplib library to be togglable. Some other platforms may not support it, or people might simply not want to link it - this forces bundling downloading and networking capabilities when they aren't really needed in many cases.

+1 for bringing back the ability to disable download functionalities at compile time.

@angt this is required because it doesn't make sense on certain use cases, for example wasm/emscripten or building it as for FFI binding. While it's technically compiles, it will become dead code

i agree with ngxson

Yes, of course, but still we need to fix the bug.
Then we can isolate the download code in a better way to be used only when it's required.