Ref T2230. This is substantially more complicated than Git, but mostly because Mercurial's protocol is a like 50 ad-hoc extensions cobbled together. Because we must decode protocol frames in order to determine if a request is read or write, 90% of this is implementing a stream parser for the protocol.
Mercurial's own parser is simpler, but relies on blocking reads. Since we don't even have methods for blocking reads right now and keeping the whole thing non-blocking is conceptually better, I made the parser nonblocking. It ends up being a lot of stuff. I made an effort to cover it reasonably well with unit tests, and to make sure we fail closed (i.e., reject requests) if there are any parts of the protocol I got wrong.
A lot of the complexity is sharable with the HTTP stuff, so it ends up being not-so-bad, just very hard to verify by inspection as clearly correct.