The point people are beating around the bush at here is that a binary RPC framework has no such need for HTTP handling, even for handshaking, when a more terse protocol of your own design would/could/might? be better.

I totally understand your reasoning behind leaning on websockets. You can test with a data channel in a browser app. But if we are talking low-latency, Superman fast, modern C++, RPC and forgeddaboutit. Look into handling an initial payload with credential negotiation outside of HTTP 1.1.