Web development in C: Crazy?

Post by jamesjporter » Wed, Sep 18, 2013, 2:20 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #70

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…

Post by coldarchon » Wed, Sep 18, 2013, 2:27 PM UTC

readme wrote: post #44

DigitalJack wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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...

Post by zeteo » Wed, Sep 18, 2013, 2:35 PM UTC

MichaelSalib wrote: post #162

zeteo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 succe…

I've never met anyone who programmed in C because they were too dumb to learn anything else I have. They were too dumb to understand that they were writing unsafe C code because they weren't skilled enough to write safe C code. So it never occurred to them that they had a problem that would be solved by writing part of their system in Python or Ruby or Java. it's often processed by a succession of "segfault-y" and "a…

Post by X4 » Wed, Sep 18, 2013, 2:42 PM UTC

jamesjporter wrote: post #171

chrismorgan wrote: post #70

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…

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 s…

Post by philhippus » Wed, Sep 18, 2013, 3:21 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #160

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 .