23 ms·

Web development in C: Crazy?

187 points by dysoco 13y ago

noonespecial 13y ago
I wrote a little backend section in C once to do a FFT on some data and it ended up being 7 times faster or so than the perl the rest of the backed was written in. It made sense there. Developing a whole CRUD app in C however? Seems like it would feel like digging a swimming pool with a spoon.
- auvrw 13y ago
  > I wrote a little backend section in C once to do a FFT on some data yeah, this kind of thing is what i thought the article's title meant and was going to say "no, actually quite common," but then read the article. and given the choice between "crazy" and "crazy like a fox," i'd say "crazy like a fox, but still crazy."
damian2000 13y ago
Might anyone looking for a speedup akin to C do better to look at Go instead?
- eru 13y ago
  Or Haskell.
- frozenport 13y ago
  yes
- programminggeek 13y ago
  I would second this. Go has enough batteries included that you can write nice little web things with the same basic development experience you get in python or ruby or php. It's really quite wonderful.
- zem 13y ago
  i'd say ocaml or one of the faster schemes, though go isn't too bad a choice either.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Any language with native code compilers will do.
Figs 13y ago
A lot of embedded systems have web configuration interfaces written in C. For example, your wireless router's configuration page is probably written in C.
- stevelaz 13y ago
  True that. I've written a few Web interfaces for embedded devices in C. That being said, I now try to use Lua along with C for projects of this type. It all really depends on memory and performance requirements. I was once part of a team on a project that we wrote an embedded webserver that we compiled in all the html, images(converted to c arrays), css and js, into a single binary so that we wouldn't have to read from flash to load those resources for speed boost and less flash access. I've learned now, that given the target hardware and resources, that wasn't really necessary...
- desas 13y ago
  Router configuration pages are usually awful. With string handling being an awful pain in C, it might explain why my router only does validation in javascript (thankfully, it means I can disable it when it is wrong).
jerf 13y ago
So, people can't hardly write safe web apps in PHP without spraying XSS and auth bypasses and arbitrary shell executions and arbitrary SQL injections everywhere, and you also want to hand the attackers the ability to segfault your server or possibly even straight-up run arbitrary code? Anyone smart enough to truly safely code a website in C is smart enough to learn a language to create that website which doesn't get on all fours and beg to be owned. Yes, I mean that 100% seriously. If you're smart enough to safely write that C code, you won't. If you aren't smart enough to write that C code safely... and the first clue that you aren't is that you think that you are... you don't stand a chance. It's suicidal.
- deleted 13y ago
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- srl 13y ago
  I once wrote a website (a search engine for a specific set of websites) in C. It actually worked, once I spend 20 hours in valgrind. I've grown since then, in two important ways. First, I'd probably do a better job now, and not have to spend any time in valgrind at all (I still use C quite frequently). Second, I'd never, ever, try to pull that stunt again.
  - mheathr 13y ago
    If you have not already and can do so, I highly recommend adding Dtrace to your C development toolkit. Dtrace, Valgrind, and GDB make rooting out C runtime issues a lot more pleasant and complement one another well.
    - 4ad 13y ago
      Indeed. It's a pity DTrace is not available in Linux (there are two ports, none work for real work). It's also a pity DTrace in OS X is starting to bit rot.
      - X4 13y ago
        I don't know where the problem is, I use http://gpo.zugaina.org/dev-util/dtrace http://gpo.zugaina.org/dev-util/dtrace on Gentoo without a problem.
rjzzleep 13y ago
You think? Cpoll[1] is actually on top of the techempower web framework benchmark [2] onion to be honest looks more like a http server generation framework. similar to what rob fitzpatrick was talking about when he was advocating gos net/http. but then again what do i know i haven't tried any of them. Personally, even though ruby makes my salary I like C. Always did. Treefrog looks the most like a modern web framework to me. [3] [1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpollcppsp/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpollcppsp/ [2] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ [3] http://www.treefrogframework.org/documents/tutorial http://www.treefrogframework.org/documents/tutorial
- bhauer 13y ago
  Treefrog is coming in Round 7 [1]. (And sorry, we still don't have an ETA for Round 7 but we are hoping for this month.) [1] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/pull/283 https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/pull/283
jaredsohn 13y ago
I've always found it interesting that OkCupid is built with C++, although they started it before 2001. http://www.okcupid.com/about/technology http://www.okcupid.com/about/technology
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  OKWS is interesting to study because it's one of the few Staged, Event-Driven Architecture (SEDA) websites in well-known production use. Max Krohn's 2004 paper describing the design of OKWS is excellent reading[1]. With the rise of VMs, jails, containers etc it should be much easier for general webapps to adopt this architecture. [1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~max/docs/okws.pdf http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~max/docs/okws.pdf
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
WHYYYYYYYYY No, seriously, why? As far as I can tell, his entire argument is "web development in C is terrible and limiting, but not as quite as terrible and limiting as you might think." I guess that's good news if terrorists are forcing you to write websites in C, but I don't see even an attempt at explaining why you would choose to do this.
- DigitalJack 13y ago
  There exists a form of survivalist mindset in some programmers. It goes roughly like this: if you can't boot it, it's fluff programming. The attraction of C to this mindset is that it can be transliterated (vs translated) into machine code. This transliteration is so straight forward that if you know C and are familiar with the basics of the instruction set you can do it by hand. The survivalist mindset fears dependence. VMs and interpreters are the essence of dependence. So those with this mindset always seek find a way to do it in plain C when they can.
  - derefr 13y ago
    > VMs and interpreters are the essence of dependence. I find that an odd perspective. If you can rewrite your VM/interpreter from scratch, are you really dependent on it? I guess I see it less as "use some black-box language runtime to solve this problem" and more as "I will use plain C to solve this problem... by writing an interpreter in plain C for a good DSL to solve this problem in, and then writing the solution in that DSL. But, you know, someone else already did the first part. I'd do it myself if they hadn't, though."
  - readme 13y ago
    On the next episode of "Doomsday Coders" Programmer writes an entire operating system from scratch in case all the copies of Linux in the world are deleted. A web developer writes his entire application in x86 assembly to prepare for an event in which all the world's compilers and interpreters disappear. And more...
    - reinhardt 13y ago
moron4hire 13y ago
I've done a number of projects that were web-oriented in C and C++ over the years, and they are by no means my primary language. It wasn't that bad, especially if you take the time to learn how to do string manipulation properly (which isn't really that hard). Come to think of it, even though we consider C to be "low level", that's really only a temporary problem that solves itself the longer you work with it and the more you build with it. It's a site different issue than the opposite issue of Ruby and PHP, which will never be able to have quite the raw performance of C. It's a bit like the difference between fast-food and gourmet. Yes, fast-food American burgers is probably easier than fast-food... French ratatouille. When you're employees are barely passed childhood and not particularly trained in the arts, you'll bet your business on the burger (RE: the similar bubbles in the gastro-pub market vis technologicalist startup). But a practitioner at the top their game will do wonderful things with either.
- derleth 13y ago
  > It wasn't that bad, especially if you take the time to learn how to do string manipulation properly (which isn't really that hard). It's hard in the way that counts: It's tedious and prone to precisely the kinds of errors humans make when a task is tedious. Worse, string manipulation is precisely where all of the potentially dangerous bugs can live in the average C program, especially if you're accepting data from untrusted sources. > Come to think of it, even though we consider C to be "low level", that's really only a temporary problem that solves itself the longer you work with it and the more you build with it. Aside from the fact you can say the same about assembly, this is another reason to disfavor C: Reinventing the wheel. Over and over again. I say all this as someone who actually likes C, and even somewhat enjoys doing string processing in C. I even know about strstr(3), which never seems to get mentioned. The main thing I know, however, is that it isn't worth it unless you live in a contrived circumstance. Yes, you can go really fast by strapping yourself to that rocket, and if you remove the helmet you'll reduce your weight and go even faster. Nobody's doubting you. However, very few people want to stand downrange of you.
wwweston 13y ago
At my first web job circa 1996, our shopping cart product was mostly C, so I did web development in C for about two years. I'm not sure that using C was the craziest thing about how we did things. Nobody really had an idea how to structure a web app, so it was more or less a dozen or so CGIs which read/wrote to flat files through custom-written dbm clone (woo, NoSQL in '96!). Lots of unsophisticated string munging. Maybe if we'd had some better abstractions, it wouldn't have been as painful, but C code written to do a lot of ad hoc string cobbling is, in fact, a little crazy. Despite this, the product pretty much worked and actually had a few hundred customers and a future. (We even got looked at by Yahoo, but they bought some outfit named Viaweb instead.)
- oscardelben 13y ago
  You should have used lisp :p
- ced 13y ago
  During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
  - cbsmith 13y ago
    That's using language choice as a proxy for developer talent. It's a proxy, not a real metric of the language itself. I'd note that pg ultimately sold to Yahoo, who a) wrote a fair bit of C in house themselves and b) were severely trounced by a competitor that initially was primarily using C++ (Google).
abimaelmartell 13y ago
i been working with ntop, its a web interface written in C, the HTML is embedded within the C code. As a rails/php developer this is kind of crazy :P Heres the source https://svn.ntop.org/svn/ntop/trunk/ntop/httpd.c https://svn.ntop.org/svn/ntop/trunk/ntop/httpd.c
- stevelaz 13y ago
  Hehe, this looks similar to some stuff I've worked on with embedded devices.
ezyang 13y ago
Yes.
deleted 13y ago
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mistercow 13y ago
It seems like if you want to get the performance benefits of C with web development, that's something you can do, but it does seem downright crazy to try to do it all with C. Use something safe and abstract as glue and for talking to the client, and use C for any heavy lifting, if the benefit can justify the extra work.
D9u 13y ago
This is a nice summary, and the links are handy reference for the subject. Security concerns aside, I've occasionally used small C routines in web-app CGI calls, and often wondered if others have gone further with C and web development.
nemothekid 13y ago
There are hardly any benefits in writing your web app in C ove r Java or Go. That 1% speed increase is nothing compared to the huge amount network wait these apps will be doing. If you really consider it, what 95% of people write these days is glue between various services, and the parts that do matter, where you need the most performance, are already written in C. The reason why Redis, MongoDB and Postgres have good C bindings, because they themselves are written in C. So when it comes down to it all you are really doing is string parsing and string transporting, thats really the last thing you want to leave to C. I haven't done straight-C code that has required me to do a lot of string manipulation, but I guarantee I'll probably leave a buffer overflow exploit open when trying to parse GET variables. Or I can just do it in Java, and get all the performance and almost all the advantages of doing it in C.
- cbsmith 13y ago
  > If you really consider it, what 95% of people write these days is glue between various services, and the parts that do matter, where you need the most performance, are already written in C. I think that is absolutely on the money?... but what if you are building one of those components?... or what if you are writing a very thin wrapper on one of those components, and it is brand new and only has C bindings?... or what if you need to be portable to dozens of different platforms, many of which don't share much toolchain overlap except for gcc? > but I guarantee I'll probably leave a buffer overflow exploit open when trying to parse GET variables. It's pretty easy to avoid that if you are worried about it. There are buffer/blob abstractions that give you "safe" interfaces with 0 risk of buffer overflow. Really, there is no good reason to have those unless you really are trading safety for performance. > Or I can just do it in Java, and get all the performance and almost all the advantages of doing it in C. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. It depends on the problem... and your levels of skill with both Java & C.
- moconnor 13y ago
  C and C++ compilers can produce faster execution than Go or JVMs as they support SIMD vectorization e.g. SSE/AVX. For CPU-bound workloads you can get more than 2x speed up. It doesn't mean you should write your entire server stack in C vs calling a C function for heavy computation, but the idea that Java and Go approach 99% the speed of C/C++/Fortran is generally only true for programs that are not optimized for performance.
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eksith 13y ago
Well, C++ already has a couple of web frameworks : http://cppcms.com/wikipp/en/page/main http://cppcms.com/wikipp/en/page/main http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt I'm not sure that's a good idea though. It's hard to fail safely in a language that can fail silently. And failure modes include, not just blatant hacks into the underlying system, but surreptitious insertion that can propagate to all your visitors. Besides the fact that it's pretty hard to find a decent C developer these days who's also interested in web development, you have a climate that's not exactly conducive to development in it. If it breaks or needs upgrading, will you do the work yourself? If it's that small, then it's probably not something you'd worry about too much, but then it's only on your shoulders.
stephengillie 13y ago
If you want to make an Arduino serve websites, you'll have to write embedded-C commands that write HTML to browsers and can interpret POST commands.
fusiongyro 13y ago
I wrote a small (~300 line) C program to scrape an email and insert the part I wanted into a Postgres database. I used PCRE for the extraction and ECPG for the Postgres part. ECPG stands for embedded SQL in C for Postgres, and it looks like this: // Open the storage subsystem. void open_storage() { EXEC SQL BEGIN DECLARE SECTION; const char* database = DATABASE_NAME; const char* username = USERNAME; const char* schema = SCHEMA; EXEC SQL END DECLARE SECTION; EXEC SQL WHENEVER SQLERROR CALL quit(); EXEC SQL CONNECT TO :database USER :username; EXEC SQL SET search_path to :schema; } ECPG: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/ecpg.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/ecpg.html My takeaway was that it was a lot easier than I expected, but it was still kind of a minefield. ECPG isn't widely used or highly intelligent, so there are a lot of stumbling blocks despite the pretty high quality documentation. I would recommend hiding your ECPG behind some functions so you only have to run some of your files through the pre-processor. But it is a neat tool and I could see myself using it again.
- X4 13y ago
  This made me curious! Why did you do this? To create a database of "signatures" to be used in your contact-list?
  - fusiongyro 13y ago
    No, I signed up for the xe.com daily currency exchange rates email and it occurred to me I could build a database around it. So now I have daily exchange rate data going back a couple years. Thankfully they haven't changed their format. They have a service you can pay for if you want to download this data in bulk but I was being cheap and didn't really have any particular use for the data. Source code: https://bitbucket.org/fusiongyro/exchange_rates/src https://bitbucket.org/fusiongyro/exchange_rates/src
    - X4 13y ago
      Thank you! I am curious about the trade-market too
electic 13y ago
Also, OKCupid is written in C++.
- stevekemp 13y ago
  See this link for more details on that : http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~max/docs/okws.pdf http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~max/docs/okws.pdf
seryoiupfurds 13y ago
The Fossil DVCS has a built-in web interface for reviewing commits, along with a bug tracker and a wiki. It's all written in C, albeit with a couple of custom macro preprocessors. I once wrote a toy web page in C; Lex made for nice HTML templating and with pseudOO it actually felt pretty modern, but I still wasted a whole lot of time reinventing various wheels.
- e12e 13y ago
  Thanks for the reminder about fossil. I tend to forget that it's all c (and therefore, must contain a wiki in c). Reviewing in that code base added to todo...
briannickel 13y ago
I once inherited a website written in C. I actually tried moving it to PHP but the server was hitting a rogue MySQL instance with a file socket and I couldn't find a PHP API to handle it. There were two things I did that actually made it pretty painless to work with: I implemented a Dreamweaver template processor that you could hook up to output a string or execute a block on each template element. I also implemented a preprocessor that allowed injection of large HTML blocks: for (int i = 0; i < n; i ++) { [[[<tr><td>(((i))). {{{strings[i]}}}</td></tr>]]] } It's an interesting exercise, but as soon as I left they scrapped it for something maintainable.
yk 13y ago
Writing web services in C can of course be done; I even believe that there are legitimate designs were it makes sense. Namely, if the back end is anyhow custom written and all you need is a smallish server to talk to the client. ( For example games, were the server simulates a world.) But the problem I have with the article is, that in this case frameworks don't help. Web applications were C makes sense, require a very different coding style from the one the article deals with. So it makes no sense to fetch just some values from a DB and give it to a server using C. C only makes sense if one has to do a large part of the heavy lifting oneself.
JeremyMorgan 13y ago
Why? If you want the speed of compiled code you can come very close with .Net or JVM based solutions.
deleted 13y ago
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fenesiistvan 13y ago
I am using the atozed intraweb framework for web dev: http://www.atozed.com/intraweb/index.en.aspx http://www.atozed.com/intraweb/index.en.aspx Comfortable C++ framework with session management and all the other stuff you need
n1ghtmare_ 13y ago
The worst abomination I've worked with was a web app written in PL/SQL. It was lovely to maintain.
gizzlon 13y ago
The reasons for this [that no one uses C] aren’t terribly difficult to discern. Let’s face it: compared with higher-level languages, C is hard. Like, objectively hard So.. instead of leading with one of the many, many great reasons not to use C, he pretty much calls everyone too stupid to make it work.
edsiper2 13y ago
You missed to mention Duda I/O: http://duda.io On this case this framework target web services, you can do web development but the goal is to be a fast HTTP/Websocket stack instead of a friendly MVC renderer. Even is do in C, i tries to present a friendly C API as you can see in http://duda.io/api http://duda.io/api, if you think into a fast big data server front-end, Duda I/O fits pretty well. A few slides: http://duda.io/slides/
- X4 13y ago
  hehe, yeah duda and MonkeyHTTPd ftw. ! Been using both and many other webservers including nxweb for a quite some time now for trial. I do webdev in C and Julia for the Backend.
danjayh 13y ago
Why C? Performance. I wrote a C webserver on a PIC32MX795F512L (80 mhz/ 128kB RAM), and it was _screaming_ fast (for what it was running on). Easily handled ~100 clients making 2-3 requests/sec continuously to a JSON based API (I really don't know how far you could push it before it got slow), which is respectable for that chip ... but this was written to the bare metal with no OS (did use libraries for IP/TCP/HTTP/JSON, though). C isn't my first choice for web development either, but there's absolutely no way you could pull that off in a higher-level language.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Modula-2, Turbo Pascal, Ada...?
  - pestaa 13y ago
    ... Haskell...?
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      I was just listing some languages that were designed as system programming languages as well. But any language with native code compilers, that is able to have small footprint executables would do.
chrismorgan 13y ago
A language like Python or Ruby gets you ease of coding and a moderate level of safety; a language like C gets you speed but at a high safety risk. Haskell could get you often similar speed benefits, and there are even a couple of rather interesting frameworks for it (with even things like compile-time template checking), but the barrier for entry is unfortunately high. Thus a language like Rust really comes into its own: speed kin to C with safety significantly exceeding that of Python and Ruby. Users of Python and Ruby may find the parts of its type system which must be specified explicitly arduous, but it does make it ever so much more likely that code that you write just works, correctly, which (as primarily a Python developer) I have found marvellous. Rust isn't there yet for web development, but solid support for the HTTP layer is well in progress: https://github.com/chris-morgan/rust-http https://github.com/chris-morgan/rust-http. When that's far enough along, then I'll get on to the framework I have in mind.
- jamesjporter 13y ago
  I think Julia has the potential to be a contender in this space as well. The advantage over Rust or Go is that you get a dynamic language (with a REPL and everything), and still can have C-like performance. You also get metaprogramming and optional typing (so its there if you want safety but you can ignore it if you just need to crank something out). To me it really feels like a blend of the best of Python/Ruby and statically typed languages.
  - X4 13y ago
    I fully agree with you! Personally I use Julia+C for my backends. Haven't decided which language to use for the front-end though, but probably just javascript, python or php.
  - chrismorgan 13y ago
    The impression that I at least have got of Julia is that it's designed specifically for technical computing (mathematics, science, etc.) rather than general purpose programming as Rust is. I think that would be likely to influence what people use it for significantly? That could be a pity, because Julia does look like quite an interesting language. Rust's REPL, rusti, is presently broken, but it will be being fixed up later. I presume Rust's safety will also go beyond Julia's, with its algebraic data types and lack of such things as null, and its rigidly checked type system.
trimbo 13y ago
Weather Underground is implemented in C.
npx 13y ago
Slightly offtopic, but I love Node.Native[1]. It provides an API similar to Node.js using C++11 lambdas. 1. https://github.com/d5/node.native https://github.com/d5/node.native
Qantourisc 13y ago
Sorry using C is a security nightmare. You need to use a higher language like C++ that can encapsulate and abstract your web-framework enough. Or use a C framework that has secure string handling and others.
akbar501 13y ago
Reasons not to use C for web dev: 1. Maintenance costs will go through the roof with C. C developers are not cheap, and most people who use C have are not web developers. 2. Hiring will be exceptionally painful. Again, most C devs are not web devs. Put another way, most web devs use other languages. 3. Some C developers are so good that very few people can understand their code (Linus talks about this, and I've seen it happen at a prior company) By way of personal experience, in '99 we had an outstanding developer who was a rock star in C. When he left, I remember sitting in a meeting when an A+ developer (he really was good) was asked by the VP Eng, "Can you support his code". The response, "No". VP Eng: "Why is it not commented?". Response, "It's commented. In fact it's the best code I have ever seen. But I cannot support it, it's amazing, but its way beyond my skill level." I have never seen a repeat of this experience in a 4th gen language. I'm sure it can/may happen, but have not yet.
eaxitect 13y ago
I don't want to start a language war here but as a phd student working on distributed systems, choice for "C" as a language for developing high throughput web applications has some rationale. For instance, when you read most of the articles in HS.com or C10K at least, web development at large-scale requires every performance bit out of machine. Indeed, some -caugh-google-caugh- still use C++ at backend (even not in the frontend) or we see twitter switched to JVM from RoR for performance. For regular earthlings, RoR, Py, PHP and alike are still more feasible than C for "getting the job done". But the article's point of view is a bit shallow in that sense, since it's looking a way of replacing conventional frameworks (RoR etc.) for C. If you gonna develop a high-perf application in C, you probably use more wide variety of specialized libraries for focused tasks(like json processing, I18N, handling SSL, developing nginx/HAproxy modules,extensions for load balancing, etc.) rather than using a single "C framework".
JanneVee 13y ago
He forgot the use case for C web development. Small embedded systems. Not everything is CRUD.
kbart 13y ago
Sounds like a fun side project. But I would not risk doing such thing for money - support would be a nightmare. And by the way, wasn't that what Go was developed for..?
throwaway420 13y ago
I don't think the author has offered a great argument in this article. Building a new website in C sounds like a fun learning experience, but it's not a practical choice for the typical startup CRUD app. When you're a startup, your biggest problem 99.999% of the time isn't running out of memory or not having a fast enough app, but getting an MVP up and launched and finding enough paying customers so that you don't run out of money. Except in specialized cases where your app is very CPU intensive, C provides a major headache without a major immediate advantage. But C is a great choice for replacing parts of your app if you start growing and when you start figuring out exactly what services need to be faster and use less memory.
dalore 13y ago
In the early days when Perl was the CGI de jure the company I worked for wrote their cgi in C and ran on Zeus webservers. This was for performance on one of the most highly traffic'd sites at the time.
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e12e 13y ago
If you do want do do it in c, I think php pretty much got it right -- write an extension in c, and use something else for the rest. Se eg: http://phalconphp.com/en/ http://phalconphp.com/en/ Then there's of course G-Wan -- source of a lot of speculation, and frequent border-irrational (counter)claims by it's author -- but undoubtedly a good contender for easy-to use server with c-language "scripting": http://gwan.com/ http://gwan.com/ A newer server in the same space is nxweb, which seems made for doing the kind of work the article talks about - simple, high performance web-services in c: https://bitbucket.org/yarosla/nxweb/wiki/Home https://bitbucket.org/yarosla/nxweb/wiki/Home For other languages, have a look at hello-world webservers at rosetta: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world/Web_server#C http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world/Web_server#C Other related projects: mongoose - small embeddable, cross platform web server w/lua scripting: http://cesanta.com/ http://cesanta.com/ lighttz - webserver in c using libev: http://arekzb.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/lighttz-a-simple-and-fast-web-server/ http://arekzb.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/lighttz-a-simple-and-... Still, if it were me, and I needed "c-speed", I'd probably go with cgi (or fastcgi). Forking on every request might not be the absolute fastest, but with the binary cached in ram, it's still pretty fast on Linux. Or maybe just use mongrel2 and a c handler: https://github.com/derdewey/mongrel2_c_handler/tree/master/lib https://github.com/derdewey/mongrel2_c_handler/tree/master/l...
fetbaffe 13y ago
Sure, cool stuff and probably great fun doing it. However what matters in web development is not performance, nor that it is bug free and not even security. All of those things can fixed one way or the other on the server with more hacks. The one thing that matters is speed of development, that is why PHP rules so hard. "Let's argue about whether Haskell or Clojure is better while somebody else ships products using PHP and duct tape." https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352 https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352
- asdasf 13y ago
  But that comment is such a transparent and absurd red herring that it is an insult to your intelligence to repeat it. People talk about PHP too. That doesn't stop them from shipping products using it. Talking about languages has absolutely no detrimental effects on writing code.
  - fetbaffe 13y ago
    Did you understand my point how web development works? Web development is fundamentally different from application/system development.
    - asdasf 13y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur
kybernetyk 13y ago
No, not crazy. Just really tedious. I've been there and even webdev in C++ was magnitudes more comfortable than webdev in C. But webdev is a solved and trivial problem. More so it is an I/O-bound problem. So you can use the slowest language in the world as long as it boosts your productivity or makes your life super easy. (Sure, there are edge cases but 99.9% of webdevs never will be in the situation of having thousands of requests a second.)
auggierose 13y ago
Yep. Just bat shit crazy.
simias 13y ago
I'm mainly a C dev and I would never ever use C to write a web app. Not because I don't think it could be done, not because I don't think it could be done well but simply because string manipulations in C are a pity. Containers which are not dumb arrays in C are a pity. SQL bindings are much more tedious than the higher-level languages counterparts (I wrote quite a bunch of C interfacing with SQLite, it works well but requires a lot of LoC compared to perl for instance). Basically 90% of what you do in a typical web framework in your scripting language of choice becomes 10 times more tedious and error-prone in C (and probably 100 times faster but frankly, who cares?) It's already painful when I need to write sysfs and debugfs interfaces (and the linux kernel has a pretty nice API to write in those). The only reason I can imagine for using C in a web app is performances but then: 1/ I would try to profile my app and see where the bottleneck is. If it's really CPU-bound and C would really help I'd try to write a small C library for this particular piece of code and bind it in my scripting language. 2/ If I really must write the whole thing in C for some reason I'd try to push for a subset of C++ with at least std::string, std::map, constructors and destructor to ease ressource management and maybe exceptions for error handling. Done well you'll get similar performances and with a bit of luck you might actually come up with something remotely maintainable.
AndyKelley 13y ago
You can have the best of both worlds by writing low-level modules in C for use within a higher level framework. For example, I've been having a great time writing this music player backend in C[1], but as soon as it's solid I'm going to write a node.js addon module and then use that as the backend for my web-based audio player[2]. [1]: https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove [2]: https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin
popee 13y ago
libfcgi (C) + postgres worked like a charm for me. There are also things like libmicrohttpd, libevent/libev, ... that are also very useful if you want to play even more. It's not that hard if you know C.
ruben_varnish 13y ago
Although we try not to talk too much about it, many users of Varnish Cache actually use it "because it is the easiest way to get a C layer in our web stack". Others are proud creators developing web sites in it using both VCL (which is compiled into C) and C directly through VMODs or Inline-C in VCL. More: * https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/users-guide/vcl-inline-c.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/users-guide/vcl-inl... * https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/reference/vmod.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/reference/vmod.html * https://www.varnish-cache.org/vmods https://www.varnish-cache.org/vmods * https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/VCL https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/VCL
alexkus 13y ago
It all depends on whether you've got a compelling reason to or not. For us it was a simple decision, we have a mature stable product[1] that's written in C. So the path of least resistance is to write out own web framework (from scratch to avoid IP infringement problems). Sure it took time, a lot more time than grabbing something written by someone else, but that's not how it works everywhere (especially in corporate environments). Now we've got this library it makes adding HTTP client/server stuff to any of our C binaries relatively easy. Likewise string processing in C isn't a problem once you've got a suitable library built up; ADT libraries (no I don't need to implement my own buggy hashtable again and again), regexp wrapper libraries, etc. They also help maintain consistency across platforms (our product ships on 6 different platforms including Windows). If you're looking for instant gratification then C isn't the right language for you but a huge amount of the Internet is built on the back of things written in C. Are webservers (Apache, nginx) written in C similarly crazy? No. Of course, it needs someone to write a solid C HTTP framework and then open source it so that it can be maintained/improved, now that would be useful. Sadly our employer has no plans to release ours, which is a shame but I have no control over that. 1. Coming up 20 years old now and >$1.5bn in revenues over those years, not too shabby.
zx2c4 13y ago
Cgit is written by C and it's quite easy to develop with a fairly clean code base: http://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/ http://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/
16s 13y ago
"And when was the last time you wrote a function that returned 1 or 0? If you’re a Rubyist or a Pythonista or a server-side JavaScript devotee, you may never have done so." That's just returning True or False (bool). Lot's of people return that from functions in all languages.
francis- 13y ago
Not crazy, just stupid.
vasilipupkin 13y ago
why use C? if you want to go down that path why not use C++ frameworks, like http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt ?
sgt 13y ago
Also worth mentioning, a Websocket server library in C. https://github.com/m8rge/cwebsocket https://github.com/m8rge/cwebsocket
fayyazkl 13y ago
I would like to add that apart from being professionally chosen or not, this sort of opens up a way for learning web dev concepts for those who learned programming with c as the first language. They just get to see internals of all libraries quickly rather than having lots of frameworks with no easy access to source to see what is going on underneath. Good idea.
spmurrayzzz 13y ago
Doug Crockford at the TC-39 panel last night talked about how one of the most exciting things about JavaScript is that its a wildly successful general-purpose programming language that "doesn't have to look like C to be successful." His point was that we used to live in a software ecosystem where the conventional wisdom was that if a programming language didn't look like C, it wasn't going to take off. JavaScript (and even more so variants like CoffeeScript) are showing that we've moved on from that sentiment. In some ways, this article feels like a retreat to that older assumption. As if we somehow are expected to be searching for ways to work C into the modern web app landscape. Perhaps this point may somewhat orthogonal to the topic of the article and the related discussion, but I can't help but ask what problems are we solving by going back to C for web development? Is the assumed performance gain going to outweigh all the other benefits of using a higher level abstraction? None of the framework examples listed in the article really seem elegant at all when compared to higher level counterparts (Rails, Django, Spring, et al). Of course, I'm saying this without having attempted to build an application with any of them.
- ahoge 13y ago
  JavaScript is a C-like language though. It looks like C. It borrowed its syntax and even many of its keywords. Also, in some of his earlier talks he said that it looks familiar to C or Java developers (because it's a C-like language) and that this perceived familiarity is the reason why most people don't bother learning the language.
philhippus 13y ago
When you get 90x the performance using C rather than PHP, the only thing stopping its use is human resources. To put it into perspective, you would need 90 PHP servers to do the same work in the same time as a single C server. Any more debate?
- debacle 13y ago
  Yes, the cost equation of X PHP developers + 90 servers might be cheaper than the cost equation for Y C programmers + 1 server. Y is almost certainly greater than X.
  - philhippus 13y ago
    While that may be true for the short term, what about the power, maintenance, storage etc costs that recur? I'm not sure a C dev's pay is equal to the running costs of a server farm...
  - asdasf 13y ago
    People constantly repeat that, but I never see it actually be true. I frequently see people spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on hardware and hosting costs just to save $5k of developer salaries. Just because they have internalized this notion that "hardware is cheap, developers are expensive", and don't ever actually look at the numbers.
drhowarddrfine 13y ago
I own a web dev company. We do everything in C. For 10 years we've been doing so. The advantage is, we can do anything and everything. We do it faster, too. And we never have to wait for the language or some library to catch up to the new stuff. There is nothing we can't do and speed or platform is never a limitation. In fact, there's always this underlying feeling that coding in anything but C is crazy.
sbmassey 13y ago
The main problem, I think, is that web development usually requires lots of string processing, and the C standard library makes this complicated and opaque. Maybe Cello helps with that?
ajslater 13y ago
We wrote Bloglines, the first and greatest RSS reader web app, in C. And by "we" I mean Mark Fletcher did, and the people he hired like me, continued it. It wasn't bad. You just get used to keeping track of memory, arrays lengths and pointers like you do anything else. While I do prefer Python these days, I always enjoyed the looks of horror Java and PHP programmers greeted me with when I mentioned our language of choice for Bloglines.

187 points by dysoco 13y ago

I wrote a little backend section in C once to do a FFT on some data and it ended up being 7 times faster or so than the perl the rest of the backed was written in. It made sense there. Developing a whole CRUD app in C however? Seems like it would feel like digging a swimming pool with a spoon.

auvrw 13y ago
> I wrote a little backend section in C once to do a FFT on some data yeah, this kind of thing is what i thought the article's title meant and was going to say "no, actually quite common," but then read the article. and given the choice between "crazy" and "crazy like a fox," i'd say "crazy like a fox, but still crazy."

damian2000 13y ago

Might anyone looking for a speedup akin to C do better to look at Go instead?

eru 13y ago
Or Haskell.
frozenport 13y ago
yes
programminggeek 13y ago
I would second this. Go has enough batteries included that you can write nice little web things with the same basic development experience you get in python or ruby or php. It's really quite wonderful.
zem 13y ago
i'd say ocaml or one of the faster schemes, though go isn't too bad a choice either.
pjmlp 13y ago
Any language with native code compilers will do.

Figs 13y ago

A lot of embedded systems have web configuration interfaces written in C. For example, your wireless router's configuration page is probably written in C.

stevelaz 13y ago
True that. I've written a few Web interfaces for embedded devices in C. That being said, I now try to use Lua along with C for projects of this type. It all really depends on memory and performance requirements. I was once part of a team on a project that we wrote an embedded webserver that we compiled in all the html, images(converted to c arrays), css and js, into a single binary so that we wouldn't have to read from flash to load those resources for speed boost and less flash access. I've learned now, that given the target hardware and resources, that wasn't really necessary...
desas 13y ago
Router configuration pages are usually awful. With string handling being an awful pain in C, it might explain why my router only does validation in javascript (thankfully, it means I can disable it when it is wrong).

jerf 13y ago

So, people can't hardly write safe web apps in PHP without spraying XSS and auth bypasses and arbitrary shell executions and arbitrary SQL injections everywhere, and you also want to hand the attackers the ability to segfault your server or possibly even straight-up run arbitrary code? Anyone smart enough to truly safely code a website in C is smart enough to learn a language to create that website which doesn't get on all fours and beg to be owned. Yes, I mean that 100% seriously. If you're smart enough to safely write that C code, you won't. If you aren't smart enough to write that C code safely... and the first clue that you aren't is that you think that you are... you don't stand a chance. It's suicidal.

deleted 13y ago
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srl 13y ago
I once wrote a website (a search engine for a specific set of websites) in C. It actually worked, once I spend 20 hours in valgrind. I've grown since then, in two important ways. First, I'd probably do a better job now, and not have to spend any time in valgrind at all (I still use C quite frequently). Second, I'd never, ever, try to pull that stunt again.
- mheathr 13y ago
  If you have not already and can do so, I highly recommend adding Dtrace to your C development toolkit. Dtrace, Valgrind, and GDB make rooting out C runtime issues a lot more pleasant and complement one another well.
  - 4ad 13y ago
    Indeed. It's a pity DTrace is not available in Linux (there are two ports, none work for real work). It's also a pity DTrace in OS X is starting to bit rot.
    - X4 13y ago
      I don't know where the problem is, I use http://gpo.zugaina.org/dev-util/dtrace http://gpo.zugaina.org/dev-util/dtrace on Gentoo without a problem.

rjzzleep 13y ago

You think? Cpoll[1] is actually on top of the techempower web framework benchmark [2] onion to be honest looks more like a http server generation framework. similar to what rob fitzpatrick was talking about when he was advocating gos net/http. but then again what do i know i haven't tried any of them. Personally, even though ruby makes my salary I like C. Always did. Treefrog looks the most like a modern web framework to me. [3] [1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpollcppsp/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpollcppsp/ [2] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ [3] http://www.treefrogframework.org/documents/tutorial http://www.treefrogframework.org/documents/tutorial

bhauer 13y ago
Treefrog is coming in Round 7 [1]. (And sorry, we still don't have an ETA for Round 7 but we are hoping for this month.) [1] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/pull/283 https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/pull/283

jaredsohn 13y ago

I've always found it interesting that OkCupid is built with C++, although they started it before 2001. http://www.okcupid.com/about/technology http://www.okcupid.com/about/technology

jacques_chester 13y ago
OKWS is interesting to study because it's one of the few Staged, Event-Driven Architecture (SEDA) websites in well-known production use. Max Krohn's 2004 paper describing the design of OKWS is excellent reading[1]. With the rise of VMs, jails, containers etc it should be much easier for general webapps to adopt this architecture. [1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~max/docs/okws.pdf http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~max/docs/okws.pdf

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

WHYYYYYYYYY No, seriously, why? As far as I can tell, his entire argument is "web development in C is terrible and limiting, but not as quite as terrible and limiting as you might think." I guess that's good news if terrorists are forcing you to write websites in C, but I don't see even an attempt at explaining why you would choose to do this.

DigitalJack 13y ago
There exists a form of survivalist mindset in some programmers. It goes roughly like this: if you can't boot it, it's fluff programming. The attraction of C to this mindset is that it can be transliterated (vs translated) into machine code. This transliteration is so straight forward that if you know C and are familiar with the basics of the instruction set you can do it by hand. The survivalist mindset fears dependence. VMs and interpreters are the essence of dependence. So those with this mindset always seek find a way to do it in plain C when they can.
- derefr 13y ago
  > VMs and interpreters are the essence of dependence. I find that an odd perspective. If you can rewrite your VM/interpreter from scratch, are you really dependent on it? I guess I see it less as "use some black-box language runtime to solve this problem" and more as "I will use plain C to solve this problem... by writing an interpreter in plain C for a good DSL to solve this problem in, and then writing the solution in that DSL. But, you know, someone else already did the first part. I'd do it myself if they hadn't, though."
- readme 13y ago
  On the next episode of "Doomsday Coders" Programmer writes an entire operating system from scratch in case all the copies of Linux in the world are deleted. A web developer writes his entire application in x86 assembly to prepare for an event in which all the world's compilers and interpreters disappear. And more...
  - reinhardt 13y ago

moron4hire 13y ago

I've done a number of projects that were web-oriented in C and C++ over the years, and they are by no means my primary language. It wasn't that bad, especially if you take the time to learn how to do string manipulation properly (which isn't really that hard). Come to think of it, even though we consider C to be "low level", that's really only a temporary problem that solves itself the longer you work with it and the more you build with it. It's a site different issue than the opposite issue of Ruby and PHP, which will never be able to have quite the raw performance of C. It's a bit like the difference between fast-food and gourmet. Yes, fast-food American burgers is probably easier than fast-food... French ratatouille. When you're employees are barely passed childhood and not particularly trained in the arts, you'll bet your business on the burger (RE: the similar bubbles in the gastro-pub market vis technologicalist startup). But a practitioner at the top their game will do wonderful things with either.

derleth 13y ago
> It wasn't that bad, especially if you take the time to learn how to do string manipulation properly (which isn't really that hard). It's hard in the way that counts: It's tedious and prone to precisely the kinds of errors humans make when a task is tedious. Worse, string manipulation is precisely where all of the potentially dangerous bugs can live in the average C program, especially if you're accepting data from untrusted sources. > Come to think of it, even though we consider C to be "low level", that's really only a temporary problem that solves itself the longer you work with it and the more you build with it. Aside from the fact you can say the same about assembly, this is another reason to disfavor C: Reinventing the wheel. Over and over again. I say all this as someone who actually likes C, and even somewhat enjoys doing string processing in C. I even know about strstr(3), which never seems to get mentioned. The main thing I know, however, is that it isn't worth it unless you live in a contrived circumstance. Yes, you can go really fast by strapping yourself to that rocket, and if you remove the helmet you'll reduce your weight and go even faster. Nobody's doubting you. However, very few people want to stand downrange of you.

wwweston 13y ago

At my first web job circa 1996, our shopping cart product was mostly C, so I did web development in C for about two years. I'm not sure that using C was the craziest thing about how we did things. Nobody really had an idea how to structure a web app, so it was more or less a dozen or so CGIs which read/wrote to flat files through custom-written dbm clone (woo, NoSQL in '96!). Lots of unsophisticated string munging. Maybe if we'd had some better abstractions, it wouldn't have been as painful, but C code written to do a lot of ad hoc string cobbling is, in fact, a little crazy. Despite this, the product pretty much worked and actually had a few hundred customers and a future. (We even got looked at by Yahoo, but they bought some outfit named Viaweb instead.)

oscardelben 13y ago
You should have used lisp :p
ced 13y ago
During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
- cbsmith 13y ago
  That's using language choice as a proxy for developer talent. It's a proxy, not a real metric of the language itself. I'd note that pg ultimately sold to Yahoo, who a) wrote a fair bit of C in house themselves and b) were severely trounced by a competitor that initially was primarily using C++ (Google).

abimaelmartell 13y ago

i been working with ntop, its a web interface written in C, the HTML is embedded within the C code. As a rails/php developer this is kind of crazy :P Heres the source https://svn.ntop.org/svn/ntop/trunk/ntop/httpd.c https://svn.ntop.org/svn/ntop/trunk/ntop/httpd.c

stevelaz 13y ago
Hehe, this looks similar to some stuff I've worked on with embedded devices.

ezyang 13y ago

Yes.

deleted 13y ago

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mistercow 13y ago

It seems like if you want to get the performance benefits of C with web development, that's something you can do, but it does seem downright crazy to try to do it all with C. Use something safe and abstract as glue and for talking to the client, and use C for any heavy lifting, if the benefit can justify the extra work.

D9u 13y ago

This is a nice summary, and the links are handy reference for the subject. Security concerns aside, I've occasionally used small C routines in web-app CGI calls, and often wondered if others have gone further with C and web development.

nemothekid 13y ago

There are hardly any benefits in writing your web app in C ove r Java or Go. That 1% speed increase is nothing compared to the huge amount network wait these apps will be doing. If you really consider it, what 95% of people write these days is glue between various services, and the parts that do matter, where you need the most performance, are already written in C. The reason why Redis, MongoDB and Postgres have good C bindings, because they themselves are written in C. So when it comes down to it all you are really doing is string parsing and string transporting, thats really the last thing you want to leave to C. I haven't done straight-C code that has required me to do a lot of string manipulation, but I guarantee I'll probably leave a buffer overflow exploit open when trying to parse GET variables. Or I can just do it in Java, and get all the performance and almost all the advantages of doing it in C.

cbsmith 13y ago
> If you really consider it, what 95% of people write these days is glue between various services, and the parts that do matter, where you need the most performance, are already written in C. I think that is absolutely on the money?... but what if you are building one of those components?... or what if you are writing a very thin wrapper on one of those components, and it is brand new and only has C bindings?... or what if you need to be portable to dozens of different platforms, many of which don't share much toolchain overlap except for gcc? > but I guarantee I'll probably leave a buffer overflow exploit open when trying to parse GET variables. It's pretty easy to avoid that if you are worried about it. There are buffer/blob abstractions that give you "safe" interfaces with 0 risk of buffer overflow. Really, there is no good reason to have those unless you really are trading safety for performance. > Or I can just do it in Java, and get all the performance and almost all the advantages of doing it in C. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. It depends on the problem... and your levels of skill with both Java & C.
moconnor 13y ago
C and C++ compilers can produce faster execution than Go or JVMs as they support SIMD vectorization e.g. SSE/AVX. For CPU-bound workloads you can get more than 2x speed up. It doesn't mean you should write your entire server stack in C vs calling a C function for heavy computation, but the idea that Java and Go approach 99% the speed of C/C++/Fortran is generally only true for programs that are not optimized for performance.

deleted 13y ago

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eksith 13y ago

Well, C++ already has a couple of web frameworks : http://cppcms.com/wikipp/en/page/main http://cppcms.com/wikipp/en/page/main http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt I'm not sure that's a good idea though. It's hard to fail safely in a language that can fail silently. And failure modes include, not just blatant hacks into the underlying system, but surreptitious insertion that can propagate to all your visitors. Besides the fact that it's pretty hard to find a decent C developer these days who's also interested in web development, you have a climate that's not exactly conducive to development in it. If it breaks or needs upgrading, will you do the work yourself? If it's that small, then it's probably not something you'd worry about too much, but then it's only on your shoulders.

stephengillie 13y ago

If you want to make an Arduino serve websites, you'll have to write embedded-C commands that write HTML to browsers and can interpret POST commands.

fusiongyro 13y ago

I wrote a small (~300 line) C program to scrape an email and insert the part I wanted into a Postgres database. I used PCRE for the extraction and ECPG for the Postgres part. ECPG stands for embedded SQL in C for Postgres, and it looks like this: // Open the storage subsystem. void open_storage() { EXEC SQL BEGIN DECLARE SECTION; const char* database = DATABASE_NAME; const char* username = USERNAME; const char* schema = SCHEMA; EXEC SQL END DECLARE SECTION; EXEC SQL WHENEVER SQLERROR CALL quit(); EXEC SQL CONNECT TO :database USER :username; EXEC SQL SET search_path to :schema; } ECPG: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/ecpg.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/ecpg.html My takeaway was that it was a lot easier than I expected, but it was still kind of a minefield. ECPG isn't widely used or highly intelligent, so there are a lot of stumbling blocks despite the pretty high quality documentation. I would recommend hiding your ECPG behind some functions so you only have to run some of your files through the pre-processor. But it is a neat tool and I could see myself using it again.

X4 13y ago
This made me curious! Why did you do this? To create a database of "signatures" to be used in your contact-list?
- fusiongyro 13y ago
  No, I signed up for the xe.com daily currency exchange rates email and it occurred to me I could build a database around it. So now I have daily exchange rate data going back a couple years. Thankfully they haven't changed their format. They have a service you can pay for if you want to download this data in bulk but I was being cheap and didn't really have any particular use for the data. Source code: https://bitbucket.org/fusiongyro/exchange_rates/src https://bitbucket.org/fusiongyro/exchange_rates/src
  - X4 13y ago
    Thank you! I am curious about the trade-market too

electic 13y ago

Also, OKCupid is written in C++.

stevekemp 13y ago
See this link for more details on that : http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~max/docs/okws.pdf http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~max/docs/okws.pdf

seryoiupfurds 13y ago

The Fossil DVCS has a built-in web interface for reviewing commits, along with a bug tracker and a wiki. It's all written in C, albeit with a couple of custom macro preprocessors. I once wrote a toy web page in C; Lex made for nice HTML templating and with pseudOO it actually felt pretty modern, but I still wasted a whole lot of time reinventing various wheels.

e12e 13y ago
Thanks for the reminder about fossil. I tend to forget that it's all c (and therefore, must contain a wiki in c). Reviewing in that code base added to todo...

briannickel 13y ago

I once inherited a website written in C. I actually tried moving it to PHP but the server was hitting a rogue MySQL instance with a file socket and I couldn't find a PHP API to handle it. There were two things I did that actually made it pretty painless to work with: I implemented a Dreamweaver template processor that you could hook up to output a string or execute a block on each template element. I also implemented a preprocessor that allowed injection of large HTML blocks: for (int i = 0; i < n; i ++) { [[[<tr><td>(((i))). {{{strings[i]}}}</td></tr>]]] } It's an interesting exercise, but as soon as I left they scrapped it for something maintainable.

yk 13y ago

Writing web services in C can of course be done; I even believe that there are legitimate designs were it makes sense. Namely, if the back end is anyhow custom written and all you need is a smallish server to talk to the client. ( For example games, were the server simulates a world.) But the problem I have with the article is, that in this case frameworks don't help. Web applications were C makes sense, require a very different coding style from the one the article deals with. So it makes no sense to fetch just some values from a DB and give it to a server using C. C only makes sense if one has to do a large part of the heavy lifting oneself.

JeremyMorgan 13y ago

Why? If you want the speed of compiled code you can come very close with .Net or JVM based solutions.

deleted 13y ago

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fenesiistvan 13y ago

I am using the atozed intraweb framework for web dev: http://www.atozed.com/intraweb/index.en.aspx http://www.atozed.com/intraweb/index.en.aspx Comfortable C++ framework with session management and all the other stuff you need

n1ghtmare_ 13y ago

The worst abomination I've worked with was a web app written in PL/SQL. It was lovely to maintain.

gizzlon 13y ago

The reasons for this [that no one uses C] aren’t terribly difficult to discern. Let’s face it: compared with higher-level languages, C is hard. Like, objectively hard So.. instead of leading with one of the many, many great reasons not to use C, he pretty much calls everyone too stupid to make it work.

edsiper2 13y ago

You missed to mention Duda I/O: http://duda.io On this case this framework target web services, you can do web development but the goal is to be a fast HTTP/Websocket stack instead of a friendly MVC renderer. Even is do in C, i tries to present a friendly C API as you can see in http://duda.io/api http://duda.io/api, if you think into a fast big data server front-end, Duda I/O fits pretty well. A few slides: http://duda.io/slides/

X4 13y ago
hehe, yeah duda and MonkeyHTTPd ftw. ! Been using both and many other webservers including nxweb for a quite some time now for trial. I do webdev in C and Julia for the Backend.

danjayh 13y ago

Why C? Performance. I wrote a C webserver on a PIC32MX795F512L (80 mhz/ 128kB RAM), and it was _screaming_ fast (for what it was running on). Easily handled ~100 clients making 2-3 requests/sec continuously to a JSON based API (I really don't know how far you could push it before it got slow), which is respectable for that chip ... but this was written to the bare metal with no OS (did use libraries for IP/TCP/HTTP/JSON, though). C isn't my first choice for web development either, but there's absolutely no way you could pull that off in a higher-level language.

pjmlp 13y ago
Modula-2, Turbo Pascal, Ada...?
- pestaa 13y ago
  ... Haskell...?
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    I was just listing some languages that were designed as system programming languages as well. But any language with native code compilers, that is able to have small footprint executables would do.

chrismorgan 13y ago

A language like Python or Ruby gets you ease of coding and a moderate level of safety; a language like C gets you speed but at a high safety risk. Haskell could get you often similar speed benefits, and there are even a couple of rather interesting frameworks for it (with even things like compile-time template checking), but the barrier for entry is unfortunately high. Thus a language like Rust really comes into its own: speed kin to C with safety significantly exceeding that of Python and Ruby. Users of Python and Ruby may find the parts of its type system which must be specified explicitly arduous, but it does make it ever so much more likely that code that you write just works, correctly, which (as primarily a Python developer) I have found marvellous. Rust isn't there yet for web development, but solid support for the HTTP layer is well in progress: https://github.com/chris-morgan/rust-http https://github.com/chris-morgan/rust-http. When that's far enough along, then I'll get on to the framework I have in mind.

jamesjporter 13y ago
I think Julia has the potential to be a contender in this space as well. The advantage over Rust or Go is that you get a dynamic language (with a REPL and everything), and still can have C-like performance. You also get metaprogramming and optional typing (so its there if you want safety but you can ignore it if you just need to crank something out). To me it really feels like a blend of the best of Python/Ruby and statically typed languages.
- X4 13y ago
  I fully agree with you! Personally I use Julia+C for my backends. Haven't decided which language to use for the front-end though, but probably just javascript, python or php.
- chrismorgan 13y ago
  The impression that I at least have got of Julia is that it's designed specifically for technical computing (mathematics, science, etc.) rather than general purpose programming as Rust is. I think that would be likely to influence what people use it for significantly? That could be a pity, because Julia does look like quite an interesting language. Rust's REPL, rusti, is presently broken, but it will be being fixed up later. I presume Rust's safety will also go beyond Julia's, with its algebraic data types and lack of such things as null, and its rigidly checked type system.

trimbo 13y ago

Weather Underground is implemented in C.

npx 13y ago

Slightly offtopic, but I love Node.Native[1]. It provides an API similar to Node.js using C++11 lambdas. 1. https://github.com/d5/node.native https://github.com/d5/node.native

Qantourisc 13y ago

Sorry using C is a security nightmare. You need to use a higher language like C++ that can encapsulate and abstract your web-framework enough. Or use a C framework that has secure string handling and others.

akbar501 13y ago

Reasons not to use C for web dev: 1. Maintenance costs will go through the roof with C. C developers are not cheap, and most people who use C have are not web developers. 2. Hiring will be exceptionally painful. Again, most C devs are not web devs. Put another way, most web devs use other languages. 3. Some C developers are so good that very few people can understand their code (Linus talks about this, and I've seen it happen at a prior company) By way of personal experience, in '99 we had an outstanding developer who was a rock star in C. When he left, I remember sitting in a meeting when an A+ developer (he really was good) was asked by the VP Eng, "Can you support his code". The response, "No". VP Eng: "Why is it not commented?". Response, "It's commented. In fact it's the best code I have ever seen. But I cannot support it, it's amazing, but its way beyond my skill level." I have never seen a repeat of this experience in a 4th gen language. I'm sure it can/may happen, but have not yet.

eaxitect 13y ago

I don't want to start a language war here but as a phd student working on distributed systems, choice for "C" as a language for developing high throughput web applications has some rationale. For instance, when you read most of the articles in HS.com or C10K at least, web development at large-scale requires every performance bit out of machine. Indeed, some -caugh-google-caugh- still use C++ at backend (even not in the frontend) or we see twitter switched to JVM from RoR for performance. For regular earthlings, RoR, Py, PHP and alike are still more feasible than C for "getting the job done". But the article's point of view is a bit shallow in that sense, since it's looking a way of replacing conventional frameworks (RoR etc.) for C. If you gonna develop a high-perf application in C, you probably use more wide variety of specialized libraries for focused tasks(like json processing, I18N, handling SSL, developing nginx/HAproxy modules,extensions for load balancing, etc.) rather than using a single "C framework".

JanneVee 13y ago

He forgot the use case for C web development. Small embedded systems. Not everything is CRUD.

kbart 13y ago

Sounds like a fun side project. But I would not risk doing such thing for money - support would be a nightmare. And by the way, wasn't that what Go was developed for..?

throwaway420 13y ago

I don't think the author has offered a great argument in this article. Building a new website in C sounds like a fun learning experience, but it's not a practical choice for the typical startup CRUD app. When you're a startup, your biggest problem 99.999% of the time isn't running out of memory or not having a fast enough app, but getting an MVP up and launched and finding enough paying customers so that you don't run out of money. Except in specialized cases where your app is very CPU intensive, C provides a major headache without a major immediate advantage. But C is a great choice for replacing parts of your app if you start growing and when you start figuring out exactly what services need to be faster and use less memory.

dalore 13y ago

In the early days when Perl was the CGI de jure the company I worked for wrote their cgi in C and ran on Zeus webservers. This was for performance on one of the most highly traffic'd sites at the time.

deleted 13y ago

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e12e 13y ago

If you do want do do it in c, I think php pretty much got it right -- write an extension in c, and use something else for the rest. Se eg: http://phalconphp.com/en/ http://phalconphp.com/en/ Then there's of course G-Wan -- source of a lot of speculation, and frequent border-irrational (counter)claims by it's author -- but undoubtedly a good contender for easy-to use server with c-language "scripting": http://gwan.com/ http://gwan.com/ A newer server in the same space is nxweb, which seems made for doing the kind of work the article talks about - simple, high performance web-services in c: https://bitbucket.org/yarosla/nxweb/wiki/Home https://bitbucket.org/yarosla/nxweb/wiki/Home For other languages, have a look at hello-world webservers at rosetta: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world/Web_server#C http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world/Web_server#C Other related projects: mongoose - small embeddable, cross platform web server w/lua scripting: http://cesanta.com/ http://cesanta.com/ lighttz - webserver in c using libev: http://arekzb.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/lighttz-a-simple-and-fast-web-server/ http://arekzb.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/lighttz-a-simple-and-... Still, if it were me, and I needed "c-speed", I'd probably go with cgi (or fastcgi). Forking on every request might not be the absolute fastest, but with the binary cached in ram, it's still pretty fast on Linux. Or maybe just use mongrel2 and a c handler: https://github.com/derdewey/mongrel2_c_handler/tree/master/lib https://github.com/derdewey/mongrel2_c_handler/tree/master/l...

fetbaffe 13y ago

Sure, cool stuff and probably great fun doing it. However what matters in web development is not performance, nor that it is bug free and not even security. All of those things can fixed one way or the other on the server with more hacks. The one thing that matters is speed of development, that is why PHP rules so hard. "Let's argue about whether Haskell or Clojure is better while somebody else ships products using PHP and duct tape." https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352 https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352

asdasf 13y ago
But that comment is such a transparent and absurd red herring that it is an insult to your intelligence to repeat it. People talk about PHP too. That doesn't stop them from shipping products using it. Talking about languages has absolutely no detrimental effects on writing code.
- fetbaffe 13y ago
  Did you understand my point how web development works? Web development is fundamentally different from application/system development.
  - asdasf 13y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur

kybernetyk 13y ago

No, not crazy. Just really tedious. I've been there and even webdev in C++ was magnitudes more comfortable than webdev in C. But webdev is a solved and trivial problem. More so it is an I/O-bound problem. So you can use the slowest language in the world as long as it boosts your productivity or makes your life super easy. (Sure, there are edge cases but 99.9% of webdevs never will be in the situation of having thousands of requests a second.)

auggierose 13y ago

Yep. Just bat shit crazy.

simias 13y ago

I'm mainly a C dev and I would never ever use C to write a web app. Not because I don't think it could be done, not because I don't think it could be done well but simply because string manipulations in C are a pity. Containers which are not dumb arrays in C are a pity. SQL bindings are much more tedious than the higher-level languages counterparts (I wrote quite a bunch of C interfacing with SQLite, it works well but requires a lot of LoC compared to perl for instance). Basically 90% of what you do in a typical web framework in your scripting language of choice becomes 10 times more tedious and error-prone in C (and probably 100 times faster but frankly, who cares?) It's already painful when I need to write sysfs and debugfs interfaces (and the linux kernel has a pretty nice API to write in those). The only reason I can imagine for using C in a web app is performances but then: 1/ I would try to profile my app and see where the bottleneck is. If it's really CPU-bound and C would really help I'd try to write a small C library for this particular piece of code and bind it in my scripting language. 2/ If I really must write the whole thing in C for some reason I'd try to push for a subset of C++ with at least std::string, std::map, constructors and destructor to ease ressource management and maybe exceptions for error handling. Done well you'll get similar performances and with a bit of luck you might actually come up with something remotely maintainable.

AndyKelley 13y ago

You can have the best of both worlds by writing low-level modules in C for use within a higher level framework. For example, I've been having a great time writing this music player backend in C[1], but as soon as it's solid I'm going to write a node.js addon module and then use that as the backend for my web-based audio player[2]. [1]: https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove [2]: https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin

popee 13y ago

libfcgi (C) + postgres worked like a charm for me. There are also things like libmicrohttpd, libevent/libev, ... that are also very useful if you want to play even more. It's not that hard if you know C.

ruben_varnish 13y ago

Although we try not to talk too much about it, many users of Varnish Cache actually use it "because it is the easiest way to get a C layer in our web stack". Others are proud creators developing web sites in it using both VCL (which is compiled into C) and C directly through VMODs or Inline-C in VCL. More: * https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/users-guide/vcl-inline-c.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/users-guide/vcl-inl... * https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/reference/vmod.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/reference/vmod.html * https://www.varnish-cache.org/vmods https://www.varnish-cache.org/vmods * https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/VCL https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/VCL

alexkus 13y ago

It all depends on whether you've got a compelling reason to or not. For us it was a simple decision, we have a mature stable product[1] that's written in C. So the path of least resistance is to write out own web framework (from scratch to avoid IP infringement problems). Sure it took time, a lot more time than grabbing something written by someone else, but that's not how it works everywhere (especially in corporate environments). Now we've got this library it makes adding HTTP client/server stuff to any of our C binaries relatively easy. Likewise string processing in C isn't a problem once you've got a suitable library built up; ADT libraries (no I don't need to implement my own buggy hashtable again and again), regexp wrapper libraries, etc. They also help maintain consistency across platforms (our product ships on 6 different platforms including Windows). If you're looking for instant gratification then C isn't the right language for you but a huge amount of the Internet is built on the back of things written in C. Are webservers (Apache, nginx) written in C similarly crazy? No. Of course, it needs someone to write a solid C HTTP framework and then open source it so that it can be maintained/improved, now that would be useful. Sadly our employer has no plans to release ours, which is a shame but I have no control over that. 1. Coming up 20 years old now and >$1.5bn in revenues over those years, not too shabby.

zx2c4 13y ago

Cgit is written by C and it's quite easy to develop with a fairly clean code base: http://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/ http://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/

16s 13y ago

"And when was the last time you wrote a function that returned 1 or 0? If you’re a Rubyist or a Pythonista or a server-side JavaScript devotee, you may never have done so." That's just returning True or False (bool). Lot's of people return that from functions in all languages.

francis- 13y ago

Not crazy, just stupid.

vasilipupkin 13y ago

why use C? if you want to go down that path why not use C++ frameworks, like http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt ?

sgt 13y ago

Also worth mentioning, a Websocket server library in C. https://github.com/m8rge/cwebsocket https://github.com/m8rge/cwebsocket

fayyazkl 13y ago

I would like to add that apart from being professionally chosen or not, this sort of opens up a way for learning web dev concepts for those who learned programming with c as the first language. They just get to see internals of all libraries quickly rather than having lots of frameworks with no easy access to source to see what is going on underneath. Good idea.

spmurrayzzz 13y ago

Doug Crockford at the TC-39 panel last night talked about how one of the most exciting things about JavaScript is that its a wildly successful general-purpose programming language that "doesn't have to look like C to be successful." His point was that we used to live in a software ecosystem where the conventional wisdom was that if a programming language didn't look like C, it wasn't going to take off. JavaScript (and even more so variants like CoffeeScript) are showing that we've moved on from that sentiment. In some ways, this article feels like a retreat to that older assumption. As if we somehow are expected to be searching for ways to work C into the modern web app landscape. Perhaps this point may somewhat orthogonal to the topic of the article and the related discussion, but I can't help but ask what problems are we solving by going back to C for web development? Is the assumed performance gain going to outweigh all the other benefits of using a higher level abstraction? None of the framework examples listed in the article really seem elegant at all when compared to higher level counterparts (Rails, Django, Spring, et al). Of course, I'm saying this without having attempted to build an application with any of them.

ahoge 13y ago
JavaScript is a C-like language though. It looks like C. It borrowed its syntax and even many of its keywords. Also, in some of his earlier talks he said that it looks familiar to C or Java developers (because it's a C-like language) and that this perceived familiarity is the reason why most people don't bother learning the language.

philhippus 13y ago

When you get 90x the performance using C rather than PHP, the only thing stopping its use is human resources. To put it into perspective, you would need 90 PHP servers to do the same work in the same time as a single C server. Any more debate?

debacle 13y ago
Yes, the cost equation of X PHP developers + 90 servers might be cheaper than the cost equation for Y C programmers + 1 server. Y is almost certainly greater than X.
- philhippus 13y ago
  While that may be true for the short term, what about the power, maintenance, storage etc costs that recur? I'm not sure a C dev's pay is equal to the running costs of a server farm...
- asdasf 13y ago
  People constantly repeat that, but I never see it actually be true. I frequently see people spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on hardware and hosting costs just to save $5k of developer salaries. Just because they have internalized this notion that "hardware is cheap, developers are expensive", and don't ever actually look at the numbers.

drhowarddrfine 13y ago

I own a web dev company. We do everything in C. For 10 years we've been doing so. The advantage is, we can do anything and everything. We do it faster, too. And we never have to wait for the language or some library to catch up to the new stuff. There is nothing we can't do and speed or platform is never a limitation. In fact, there's always this underlying feeling that coding in anything but C is crazy.

sbmassey 13y ago

The main problem, I think, is that web development usually requires lots of string processing, and the C standard library makes this complicated and opaque. Maybe Cello helps with that?

ajslater 13y ago

We wrote Bloglines, the first and greatest RSS reader web app, in C. And by "we" I mean Mark Fletcher did, and the people he hired like me, continued it. It wasn't bad. You just get used to keeping track of memory, arrays lengths and pointers like you do anything else. While I do prefer Python these days, I always enjoyed the looks of horror Java and PHP programmers greeted me with when I mentioned our language of choice for Bloglines.