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Web development in C: Crazy?

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Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#21

Post by DigitalJack »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #11

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.

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.

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#22

Post by nemothekid »

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.

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#23

Post by auvrw »

noonespecial wrote: post #2

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.

> 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."

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#24

Post by mheathr »

srl wrote: post #20
jerf wrote: post #5

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…

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.

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.

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#25

Post by [deleted] »

jerf wrote: post #5

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…

[deleted]

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#26

Post by D9u »

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.

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#27

Post by telephonetemp »

jerf wrote: post #5

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…

This makes me wonder, are there any decent (military grade?) web frameworks for Ada?

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#29

Post by derefr »

DigitalJack wrote: post #21
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #11

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.

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 depende…

> 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."

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#30

Post by eksith »

Well, C++ already has a couple of web frameworks : http://cppcms.com/wikipp/en/page/main

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.

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