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BCHS stack – BSD, C, httpd, SQLite

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Re: BCHS stack – BSD, C, httpd, SQLite

#31

Post by masklinn »

sobakistodor wrote: post #27
adrianN wrote: post #12

Writing web-facing code in C in 2021 is seldomly a good idea, even if it runs on OpenBSD in a jail.

It is good idea in terms of long-term money spendings: if you already have good C++ HTTP framework, you spend less cpu/memory and can make web-service\site that can live forever for 0.00001 dollars a month. Of if you planning to serve lost of requests AND want users to feel low latency responce, you have no options: Rust, Go, C++, maybe something else. Main fight must occur on the "C++ vs Rust" scene, but C++ certain…

> Of if you planning to serve lost of requests AND want users to feel low latency responce, you have no options: Rust, Go, C++, maybe something else.

That sounds like a lot of options. While I don't exactly like Go, that's very much the sort of things it was designed for, "stdlib-only" go will give you everything you need with pretty much guaranteed safety.

> Main fight must occur on the "C++ vs Rust" scene, but C++ certainly wont die in another 20 yers, so you happy using it for long-term projects.

The concern is less the death of C++ and more exposing C over the web, which exponentially increases the damage of any mistake you make (likewise C++ though likely with a lower exponent).

Re: BCHS stack – BSD, C, httpd, SQLite

#32

Post by adrianN »

sobakistodor wrote: post #27
adrianN wrote: post #12

Writing web-facing code in C in 2021 is seldomly a good idea, even if it runs on OpenBSD in a jail.

It is good idea in terms of long-term money spendings: if you already have good C++ HTTP framework, you spend less cpu/memory and can make web-service\site that can live forever for 0.00001 dollars a month. Of if you planning to serve lost of requests AND want users to feel low latency responce, you have no options: Rust, Go, C++, maybe something else. Main fight must occur on the "C++ vs Rust" scene, but C++ certain…

The boring, memory safe, option seems to be Java, but I haven't touched java for web stuff in a number of years. Is the performance much worse than Go? Go seems to be really nice for web stuff, afaik it's one of the things it was designed for.

Re: BCHS stack – BSD, C, httpd, SQLite

#33

Post by secondcoming »

Our core business is served by an apache module written in C++. I don't particularly like apache but writing an HTTP server from scratch is deceptively hard, especially in C. We took a quick look at nginx but found it hard to figure out. We also use microhttpd to give us an entrypoint where we can pull stats from small programs.

Re: BCHS stack – BSD, C, httpd, SQLite

#34

Post by sobakistodor »

adrianN wrote: post #32
sobakistodor wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is good idea in terms of long-term money spendings: if you already have good C++ HTTP framework, you spend less cpu/memory and can make web-service\site that can live forever for 0.00001 dollars a month. Of if you planning to serve lost of requests AND want users to feel low latency responce, you have no options: Rust, Go, C++, maybe something else. Main fight must occur on the "C++ vs Rust" scene, but C++ certain…

The boring, memory safe, option seems to be Java, but I haven't touched java for web stuff in a number of years. Is the performance much worse than Go? Go seems to be really nice for web stuff, afaik it's one of the things it was designed for.

Java makes you think about its GC. "What i must do to prevent GC wake up". Always re-use allocated objects and so on. Or you turn off GC. So, you got C++. But with C++ you write smaller code (considering C++11...C++20 standards) compared to Java, so why you need "bloated C++-like language (Java is) if you can use C++".

Re: BCHS stack – BSD, C, httpd, SQLite

#35

Post by sobakistodor »

masklinn wrote: post #31
sobakistodor wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is good idea in terms of long-term money spendings: if you already have good C++ HTTP framework, you spend less cpu/memory and can make web-service\site that can live forever for 0.00001 dollars a month. Of if you planning to serve lost of requests AND want users to feel low latency responce, you have no options: Rust, Go, C++, maybe something else. Main fight must occur on the "C++ vs Rust" scene, but C++ certain…

> Of if you planning to serve lost of requests AND want users to feel low latency responce, you have no options: Rust, Go, C++, maybe something else. That sounds like a lot of options. While I don't exactly like Go, that's very much the sort of things it was designed for, "stdlib-only" go will give you everything you need with pretty much guaranteed safety. > Main fight must occur on the "C++ vs Rust" scene, but C++…

As I remember, Go was "invented" to allow writing SMALL projects, where people previously used Bash/C/Perl. Like all these small command-line utilities and scripts to solve Site-Reliability-Engineer-tasks or DevOps-tasks. Using Go in projects larger than "multithreaded custom-binary-format to CSV converter" or "daemon watching sensors and inserting ROWS to some DB" is not very good. Big thing about GO is lots of libs available for everything (but in that view Python is better).

Re: BCHS stack – BSD, C, httpd, SQLite

#36

Post by p4bl0 »

I totally get the geeky appeal of such a web development stack (a few years ago I could have chosen that for my personal web page, for fun). But in practice I doubt that it ends up a win in terms of security, maintainability, and development time.

Re: BCHS stack – BSD, C, httpd, SQLite

#37

Post by Cthulhu_ »

dangerface wrote: post #17

Doing web development in c and getting that sweet performance boost is very tempting but the time it takes to develop even a simple website is just not worth it. I would rather spend a few pound extra on servers and goto the cinema than the hours of developer time it would take to build PHP sites in C++

You can get the same performance boost without the footgun of C if you use e.g. Go, I've done so for a while now and I'm quite enamoured by it. Possible downside is that it ships with a runtime, so binaries are at least 10MB (before optimizing for size).

That said, you mention PHP, I wonder how PHP running in HHVM compares to a more bare metal solution (or regular interpreted PHP).

Re: BCHS stack – BSD, C, httpd, SQLite

#38

Post by Cthulhu_ »

sobakistodor wrote: post #35
masklinn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of if you planning to serve lost of requests AND want users to feel low latency responce, you have no options: Rust, Go, C++, maybe something else. That sounds like a lot of options. While I don't exactly like Go, that's very much the sort of things it was designed for, "stdlib-only" go will give you everything you need with pretty much guaranteed safety. > Main fight must occur on the "C++ vs Rust" scene, but C++…

As I remember, Go was "invented" to allow writing SMALL projects, where people previously used Bash/C/Perl. Like all these small command-line utilities and scripts to solve Site-Reliability-Engineer-tasks or DevOps-tasks. Using Go in projects larger than "multithreaded custom-binary-format to CSV converter" or "daemon watching sensors and inserting ROWS to some DB" is not very good. Big thing about GO is lots of libs…

> As I remember, Go was "invented" to allow writing SMALL projects

On the contrary, one of the motivators for building Go was for large (millions of LOC) codebases; build speed and how fast a developer is comfortable in the codebase were big motivators for its build pipeline and code style.

Re: BCHS stack – BSD, C, httpd, SQLite

#39

Post by Cthulhu_ »

adrianN wrote: post #32
sobakistodor wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is good idea in terms of long-term money spendings: if you already have good C++ HTTP framework, you spend less cpu/memory and can make web-service\site that can live forever for 0.00001 dollars a month. Of if you planning to serve lost of requests AND want users to feel low latency responce, you have no options: Rust, Go, C++, maybe something else. Main fight must occur on the "C++ vs Rust" scene, but C++ certain…

The boring, memory safe, option seems to be Java, but I haven't touched java for web stuff in a number of years. Is the performance much worse than Go? Go seems to be really nice for web stuff, afaik it's one of the things it was designed for.

I'm sure performance can be comparable (in terms of requests / second) with enough tweaking and sane design choices, but Java has much longer startup times (especially if you use a framework like Spring) and much higher memory usage, so those are things to keep in mind.

Go is / feels a lot more minimalistic, much less drama and more direct code. Less opportunities to be clever.

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