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Web development in C: Crazy?

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Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#151

Post by [deleted] »

drdaeman wrote: post #148
cbsmith wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the choice C++ is way better than C, given that it allows to use higher level abstractions and replace all unsafe C heritage by library based safe constructs. You may have noticed that C++ is not always deemed universally better than C. What language are all the top web servers implemented in? C has library based safe constructs as well, and C++ still has all of C unsafety. You just get to exercise those bugs…

> C has library based safe constructs as well, and C++ still has all of C unsafety. The problem C's lacking one of most important primitives - data structures. Bugs in standard library happen pretty rarely, I guess. So, C++ users have most common data structures for free. And when I open some C-based project's code the first thing I usually expect and see is some homegrown linked list and/or map implementations (of S…

[deleted]

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#152

Post by 4ad »

mheathr wrote: post #24
srl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#153

Post by kabdib »

fiatmoney wrote: post #33
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…

Seems like the rules for C web development are the same as for any other language: don't trust user input, and delegate the sanitization to vetted library functions. It's not like it's 1991 and you have to use plain arrays and strcmp; there are really good, safe libraries for these things. That said, doing web development in a language with neither a REPL nor built-in unicode support sounds like a Bad Time.

On the other hand, if your development turnaround time is measured in seconds (due to fast compiles from a good toolchain) it really doesn't matter what you're programming in. C with a good set of libraries backing it up is probably just fine.

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#154

Post by zeteo »

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…

> If you aren't smart enough [to safely code a website in C...] the first clue that you aren't is that you think that you are

Gee, isn't that epistemology at its finest. Personally I've never met anyone who programmed in C because they were too dumb to learn anything else, but who knows. You may however be aware that, before an HTTP packet even makes it to your shiny, scripty web page, it's often processed by a succession of "segfault-y" and "arbitrary-code-running" software such as Apache and Linux.

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#155

Post by dysoco »

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.

Maybe he's doing it for fun? There doesn't have to be a reason for doing it.

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#156

Post by ianstallings »

lucian1900 wrote: post #144
ianstallings wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using that same logic we shouldn't use C for anything, because we might make a mistake . I wouldn't use this not because of possible mistakes leaking in, but because the higher-level languages have already solved some of the problems you would have to solve yourself, such as handling unicode. There are C frameworks you could use but my point is that you would come across problems that have already been solved, and yo…

And we shouldn't use C for anything, if it can at all be avoided, because the likelihood and aftermath of mistakes are enormous.

I disagree completely. But again, I use it daily. The performance and footprint benefits of C outweigh the negatives, which are basically summed up as - it's too much power.

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#157

Post by X4 »

edsiper2 wrote: post #62

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 , if you think into a fast big data server front-end, Duda I/O fits pretty well. A few slides: http://duda.io/slides/

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.

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#158

Post by Jeema101 »

lmm wrote: post #103
fusiongyro wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your problem is CPU-bound. Maybe there are good C libraries that solve your problem. Maybe you just want to learn C better. Maybe you have latency limits you need to work within. Maybe you just want to be contrary. Sometimes "why not" is worth more than "why."

> Maybe your problem is CPU-bound. Maybe you have latency limits you need to work within. Unless you have lots and lots of time to spend micro-optimizing everything, you'll get better performance writing in Haskell. > Maybe there are good C libraries that solve your problem Maybe, but most of the original post is about how lacking the library ecosystem is. I can well believe that you might have some useful domain-spe…

"Unless you have lots and lots of time to spend micro-optimizing everything, you'll get better performance writing in Haskell." [citation needed]

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#159

Post by davidhollander »

lmm wrote: post #103
fusiongyro wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your problem is CPU-bound. Maybe there are good C libraries that solve your problem. Maybe you just want to learn C better. Maybe you have latency limits you need to work within. Maybe you just want to be contrary. Sometimes "why not" is worth more than "why."

> Maybe your problem is CPU-bound. Maybe you have latency limits you need to work within. Unless you have lots and lots of time to spend micro-optimizing everything, you'll get better performance writing in Haskell. > Maybe there are good C libraries that solve your problem Maybe, but most of the original post is about how lacking the library ecosystem is. I can well believe that you might have some useful domain-spe…

> Unless you have lots and lots of time to spend micro-optimizing everything, you'll get better performance writing in Haskell.

This is stating the case too strongly. Performance wise, the naive, unoptimized solution in Haskell (ex. using the default String type instead of Data.ByteString, number crunching using lots of iteration\recursion) is going to be much slower than than the naive, unoptimized solution in C or Lua. However, for a given subset of the range between "zero" and "micro" levels of optimization, for a given problem, Haskell may still represent the local maximum.

Re: Web development in C: Crazy?

#160

Post by debacle »

philhippus wrote: post #150

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?

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.

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