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Web Applications Should Be Compiled

ediblepet.net

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Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#3

  > So this is why I’m writing a web framework in C.
Why C, why not assembly? In fact, you know what real programmers use? -- http://xkcd.com/378/

  > Grow the fuck up...
  > finding Rails developers is fucking impossible...
You grow up

  > ediblepet.net is proudly powered by WordPress
When will you release your compiled blog platform?

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#4
Ranting aside, this seems like a valid complaint. Scaling and performance seem to be reasonably important in web applications, so why not write them in C? If the only complaint is the lack of good tools, why not build those tools?

Disclaimer: I don't actually work on web apps, and therefore have no experience with these things.

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#5
I wrote the upload and download handlers for droplink.me in C as FastCGIs, anticipating performance problems. I built it; but they never really came. It was a fun exercise, but if I wasn't interested in having fun with C, I would have written it in a dynamic language.

I think the reason there isn't a "C web development community" is that programmers are more than willing to trade time for performance. Safe, readable code can be written in high level languages in a snap. You can see your ideas happen very quickly. If you run into performance problems (which I think is safe to say is a fairly rare occurrence for the average web developer who produces decent code, in any language), you can a) refactor or streamline what you already have or b) start fresh, lessons learned, in something lower level.

An aside: the site http://halfbakery.com is implemented entirely as an Apache module.

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#7
In web the model is different: You develop an app, push it live and find out what works and what does not, change and iterate.

This means that doing the iterations with minimum time and effort are important than worrying about scalability and performance.

You can always throw hardware at the perfortmace problem. If you get enough traffic to become worried about performace, that itself is the mark of success. But to become successful, first you must build the app and get it live somehow instead of worrying about performace issues or wasting months coding in some very low level language!

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#8
post #4

Ranting aside, this seems like a valid complaint. Scaling and performance seem to be reasonably important in web applications, so why not write them in C? If the only complaint is the lack of good tools, why not build those tools? Disclaimer: I don't actually work on web apps, and therefore have no experience with these things.

The increased productivity of writing in a scripting language typically outweighs the cost of extra servers. Whereas with a desktop application, you only have X resources to allocate to a task, you can always "just throw more servers at" a web application to some degree.

It is done occasionally though; last I heard, large portions of Amazon.com were written in C.

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#9
post #2

Not a bad troll. Not the best I've ever read, but not bad, either.

From 2008-09-28:

The old blog software, Typo, is nowhere near as good as Wordpress. I only used it because it was written in Ruby on Rails and I am a Ruby on Rails coder. This is a very poor means of choosing software.

Re: Web Applications Should Be Compiled

#10
post #3

> So this is why I’m writing a web framework in C. Why C, why not assembly? In fact, you know what real programmers use? -- http://xkcd.com/378/ > Grow the fuck up... > finding Rails developers is fucking impossible... You grow up > ediblepet.net is proudly powered by WordPress When will you release your compiled blog platform?

Oh, you haven't heard? He ported WordPress to C. I was pretty impressed.
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