4 ms·

Pretty much. I spent a year of my life maintaining a web app written in C circa 2002. Even then, it was a supreme pain as compared to Perl or PHP.

ams6110 9y ago
At about that time I knew a guy who insisted that the best web dev platform was AOLServer with application code written in C.
- liveoneggs 9y ago
  AOLServer + TCL was pretty slick
  - jrapdx3 9y ago
    Yes indeed, oldies but goodies. This combo is still available and maintained, well, at least in the form of naviserver. Tcl of course has continued in active development and as useful as ever. https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver/ https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver/ http://tcl.wiki/ http://tcl.wiki/
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I worked on a startup that had an AOLServer kind of clone, it was wonderful. However in our case only the DB drivers and Apache TCL module were written in C, everything else was pure TCL.
- tvaughan 9y ago
  Those were days. https://books.google.cl/books?id=AS81GLj403kC&lpg=PA113&ots=cvIP74yMep&pg=PA106#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.cl/books?id=AS81GLj403kC&lpg=PA113&ots=...
setq 9y ago
Back in 1999 I managed a similar thing written in C with flat file storage. The whole tool chain chucked out a static binary and a directory full of templates and you just cp'ed it to the target and restarted the process. When I look back I've got to be honest and say that it was actually a thing of beauty. The heavy lifting required for some core functions was quite bad but the whole thing pales in comparison to some of the enterprise and microservice based c# behemoths I have looked after since which require literally hours of head scratching to deliver a simple change. I'd rather spend that time writing C than scratching my head. I'd have a lot more hair now.
- liveoneggs 9y ago
  you can duplicate that experience with go web dev today! :)
  - setq 9y ago
    I have actually tried that and you're right. The whole experience made me consider going back to electrical engineering when I realised that the status quo hadn't improved in 20 years :)
    - walterbell 9y ago
      Have you looked at Lua+C and LuaJIT+nginx (CloudFlare, OpenResty)? Work is underway to compile a subset of Perl6 to LuaJIT+nginx.
      - setq 9y ago
        I can't get over the 1 based indexes in Lua, unless that has changed in recent years.
        walterbell 9y ago
        Still there :) The trade-off is rapid development (interpreted, GC), fast execution (JIT faster than Javascript) and easy interfacing to C libraries.

ams6110 9y ago

At about that time I knew a guy who insisted that the best web dev platform was AOLServer with application code written in C.

liveoneggs 9y ago
AOLServer + TCL was pretty slick
- jrapdx3 9y ago
  Yes indeed, oldies but goodies. This combo is still available and maintained, well, at least in the form of naviserver. Tcl of course has continued in active development and as useful as ever. https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver/ https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver/ http://tcl.wiki/ http://tcl.wiki/
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
pjmlp 9y ago
I worked on a startup that had an AOLServer kind of clone, it was wonderful. However in our case only the DB drivers and Apache TCL module were written in C, everything else was pure TCL.
tvaughan 9y ago
Those were days. https://books.google.cl/books?id=AS81GLj403kC&lpg=PA113&ots=cvIP74yMep&pg=PA106#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.cl/books?id=AS81GLj403kC&lpg=PA113&ots=...

setq 9y ago

Back in 1999 I managed a similar thing written in C with flat file storage. The whole tool chain chucked out a static binary and a directory full of templates and you just cp'ed it to the target and restarted the process. When I look back I've got to be honest and say that it was actually a thing of beauty. The heavy lifting required for some core functions was quite bad but the whole thing pales in comparison to some of the enterprise and microservice based c# behemoths I have looked after since which require literally hours of head scratching to deliver a simple change. I'd rather spend that time writing C than scratching my head. I'd have a lot more hair now.

liveoneggs 9y ago
you can duplicate that experience with go web dev today! :)
- setq 9y ago
  I have actually tried that and you're right. The whole experience made me consider going back to electrical engineering when I realised that the status quo hadn't improved in 20 years :)
  - walterbell 9y ago
    Have you looked at Lua+C and LuaJIT+nginx (CloudFlare, OpenResty)? Work is underway to compile a subset of Perl6 to LuaJIT+nginx.
    - setq 9y ago
      I can't get over the 1 based indexes in Lua, unless that has changed in recent years.
      - walterbell 9y ago
        Still there :) The trade-off is rapid development (interpreted, GC), fast execution (JIT faster than Javascript) and easy interfacing to C libraries.