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Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server

justine.lol

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Re: Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server

#11

Post by mholt »

francislavoie wrote: post #7

Caddy is a single file web server as well :) https://caddyserver.com/ Admittedly they solve different usecases, where Redbean seems to want to serve a whole static site as a single file, which isn't currently possible with Caddy, (but you can run `caddy file-server` to serve the current directory as a static site), but it may become possible in the future with Golang's new embed package https://golang.org/pkg/embed/

That's actually a pretty interesting idea. I wonder if we could make a lite version of Caddy bundled with your website embedded...no need to mess with file systems or permissions or devices and folders to run a static site. Might need some massaging to become a truly pleasant workflow though.

Re: Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server

#12

Post by kapitalx »

francislavoie wrote: post #7

Caddy is a single file web server as well :) https://caddyserver.com/ Admittedly they solve different usecases, where Redbean seems to want to serve a whole static site as a single file, which isn't currently possible with Caddy, (but you can run `caddy file-server` to serve the current directory as a static site), but it may become possible in the future with Golang's new embed package https://golang.org/pkg/embed/

Caddy is cool! Redbean is magic :p

Thanks for sharing.

Re: Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server

#13

Post by jart »

mikewarot wrote: post #6

I really like your view of the world, that programs should be portable, tiny, and just work. The slamming of so much functionality into a zip file is inspiring. Would it be possible to do something similar with Free Pascal, allowing the recreation of something like Turbo Pascal, except really, really portable .com output?

Author here. Absolutely. I used to love Turbo Pascal and Delphi when I was younger. If Free Pascal uses GNU LD.BFD or LLVM LLD when it links programs, then all you'd need to do is is configure it to use cosmopolitan.a when linking system call functions like read(), write(), etc. See https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan Another option is if Free Pascal wants to write all the system call support from scratch, then doing that now is going to be a whole lot easier since the Cosmopolitan codebase does a really good job documenting all the magic numbers you'll need. See files like https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/sysv/s... and https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/sysv/c... I've been working on a tiny C11 compiler called chibicc which has most GNU extensions and I managed to get it working as an actually portable executable with an integrated assembler: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/third_party... I also got Antirez's KILO text editor working as an APE binary. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/examples/ki... If we can build a linker too then we can get a freestanding single file toolchain + ide that's able to be a modern version of Turbo C.

Re: Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server

#15

Post by malux85 »

hprx wrote: post #10

I just spent 30 minutes reading about this. I'm so shocked that I'm logging in to comment after 5 years of lurking. Justine has built a c library that allows you compile a binary once and have it run it on any os or baremetal. The SAME binary. Quite frankly, that sentence doesn't even make sense to me. Check out https://storage.googleapis.com/justine/cosmopolitan/index.ht... As far as I'm concerned, this is literal m…

I agree, I got to the page on actually portable executable, and had to read it a few times to make sure I was grokking it properly. This is just sheer cleverness, THIS is the stuff that should be on hacker news!

Re: Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server

#16

Post by jart »

francislavoie wrote: post #7

Caddy is a single file web server as well :) https://caddyserver.com/ Admittedly they solve different usecases, where Redbean seems to want to serve a whole static site as a single file, which isn't currently possible with Caddy, (but you can run `caddy file-server` to serve the current directory as a static site), but it may become possible in the future with Golang's new embed package https://golang.org/pkg/embed/

Caddy is cool but it has a separate 33mb executable for each operating system. Redbean is a 128kb executable that runs on all platforms so it has fewer moving parts and is 1584x tinier. All the convenience of being able to "just add your assets to the zip executable" wouldn't have been feasible if we needed to repeat that process n times for each operating system.

Re: Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server

#17

Post by ghoomketu »

hprx wrote: post #10

I just spent 30 minutes reading about this. I'm so shocked that I'm logging in to comment after 5 years of lurking. Justine has built a c library that allows you compile a binary once and have it run it on any os or baremetal. The SAME binary. Quite frankly, that sentence doesn't even make sense to me. Check out https://storage.googleapis.com/justine/cosmopolitan/index.ht... As far as I'm concerned, this is literal m…

I really don't understand internals ibut I've often downloaded cygwin exe file for commands like grep, tail, etc.. Are you telling me that is no longer required?

Re: Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server

#18

Post by francislavoie »

jart wrote: post #16
francislavoie wrote: post #7

Caddy is a single file web server as well :) https://caddyserver.com/ Admittedly they solve different usecases, where Redbean seems to want to serve a whole static site as a single file, which isn't currently possible with Caddy, (but you can run `caddy file-server` to serve the current directory as a static site), but it may become possible in the future with Golang's new embed package https://golang.org/pkg/embed/

Caddy is cool but it has a separate 33mb executable for each operating system. Redbean is a 128kb executable that runs on all platforms so it has fewer moving parts and is 1584x tinier. All the convenience of being able to "just add your assets to the zip executable" wouldn't have been feasible if we needed to repeat that process n times for each operating system.

Yes of course - like I said, they solve different usecases. Caddy has way, way more features overall to make up for the bigger binary.

Re: Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server

#19

Post by francislavoie »

mholt wrote: post #11
francislavoie wrote: post #7

Caddy is a single file web server as well :) https://caddyserver.com/ Admittedly they solve different usecases, where Redbean seems to want to serve a whole static site as a single file, which isn't currently possible with Caddy, (but you can run `caddy file-server` to serve the current directory as a static site), but it may become possible in the future with Golang's new embed package https://golang.org/pkg/embed/

That's actually a pretty interesting idea. I wonder if we could make a lite version of Caddy bundled with your website embedded...no need to mess with file systems or permissions or devices and folders to run a static site. Might need some massaging to become a truly pleasant workflow though.

Yeah - I could see it being part of xcaddy tooling to package up the static assets in the binary :)

Re: Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server

#20

Post by akavel »

modeless wrote: post #9

.apk files and .ipa files are secretly zip files too. With the addition of a few manifest files and other crufty things embedded in the zip, I bet you could add Android and iOS to the list of supported platforms too.

I've recently succeeded in building working .apk files byte-by-byte completely from scratch so I could maybe help some. Open an issue on https://github.com/akavel/hellomello if interested in some talking/advice and/or watch my talk on NimConf 2020 for an overview (I don't have a link handy as I'm on mobile).
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