Writing web services in C can of course be done; I even believe that there are legitimate designs were it makes sense. Namely, if the back end is anyhow custom written and all you need is a smallish server to talk to the client. ( For example games, were the server simulates a world.) But the problem I have with the article is, that in this case frameworks don't help. Web applications were C makes sense, require a very different coding style from the one the article deals with. So it makes no sense to fetch just some values from a DB and give it to a server using C. C only makes sense if one has to do a large part of the heavy lifting oneself.
Web development in C: Crazy?
41–50 of 213 posts
Re: Web development in C: Crazy?
#42At my first web job circa 1996, our shopping cart product was mostly C, so I did web development in C for about two years. I'm not sure that using C was the craziest thing about how we did things. Nobody really had an idea how to structure a web app, so it was more or less a dozen or so CGIs which read/wrote to flat files through custom-written dbm clone (woo, NoSQL in '96!). Lots of unsophisticated string munging. M…
During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.
Re: Web development in C: Crazy?
#43Why? If you want the speed of compiled code you can come very close with .Net or JVM based solutions.
Re: Web development in C: Crazy?
#44WHYYYYYYYYY 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…
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...
Re: Web development in C: Crazy?
#45[deleted]
Re: Web development in C: Crazy?
#46WHYYYYYYYYY 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.
I should think the reasons are obvious:
1) Whatever language you are most proficient in, that is often the most efficient tool for _you_ to get the job done right.
2) PHP is largely C for people who should never program in C (or PHP ;-). Depending on the nature of what you are doing, and if you use some basic support libraries (and the author mentions a few), your code needn't be that much more work to get done than any other language. In reality, it's not the typing in the code that tends to matter anyway.
3) If you are, for whatever reason, interfacing with a lot of systems components or C API's, there can often be a pretty big win using C as you avoid all the pain of language impedance mismatch.
4) Depending on what it is measured against and the nature of the problem, C can often be significantly more efficient, not just in terms of CPU, but the all important memory consumption these days. Depending on the problem, that can be highly highly relevant.
5) Portability. Okay, you can stop laughing now. ;-) Seriously though, if you talk to mobile game developers who've tried it, C and C++ tend to be the best languages for targeting a plethora of platforms. That goes double or triple for embedded systems. It's really not that hard these days to have very portable C/C++ code, and platforms that insist on making C a second class citizen tend to do themselves more harm than good (even Android ultimately relented).
Now, that's not to say that I think everyone should be doing their web projects in C, but depending on the context (the problem, the available tools, and the parties involved), it might well be a good choice.
Re: Web development in C: Crazy?
#47So, 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.
[deleted]
Re: Web development in C: Crazy?
#48I am using the atozed intraweb framework for web dev: http://www.atozed.com/intraweb/index.en.aspx
Comfortable C++ framework with session management and all the other stuff you need
Re: Web development in C: Crazy?
#49So, 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.
Still an order of magnitude easier not to shoot yourself in the foot in most higher level language.
Pretty sure you still have to use plain arrays and strcmp, what are these "safe" libraries you were going to use? Unless we are talking about C++ here?
Also C supports unicode fine (to the extent it supports strings) and REPL can't hardly be considered a requirement for web development considering Java, .NET and PHP* don't have REPL's.
*Looks like PHP has some now.
Re: Web development in C: Crazy?
#50At my first web job circa 1996, our shopping cart product was mostly C, so I did web development in C for about two years. I'm not sure that using C was the craziest thing about how we did things. Nobody really had an idea how to structure a web app, so it was more or less a dozen or so CGIs which read/wrote to flat files through custom-written dbm clone (woo, NoSQL in '96!). Lots of unsophisticated string munging. M…
During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous t…
That's using language choice as a proxy for developer talent. It's a proxy, not a real metric of the language itself.
I'd note that pg ultimately sold to Yahoo, who a) wrote a fair bit of C in house themselves and b) were severely trounced by a competitor that initially was primarily using C++ (Google).