Nope.c – A web framework with a tiny footprint • Hacker News Board

Re: Nope.c – A web framework with a tiny footprint

#51

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Jul 26, 2014, 4:14 AM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #50

pjmlp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was speaking about unsafe by design. Sockets are library/OS responsibility.

I believe you missed my point, though. I will grant you that many libc functions do not follow what are currently considered best practices. But you can't take the textbook example of what not to do and say that this is representative of everyone who works in the language. Just as I can't take an example of extremely bad code in some high-level language, which naively goes against what is considered sane practice, an…

It is, because crashing is a better alternative than wounding the process and keeping on running producing bad results, or corrupting memory state and crashing anyway on a total unrelated part of the application.

Re: Nope.c – A web framework with a tiny footprint

#52

Post by peterwwillis » Sat, Jul 26, 2014, 3:50 PM UTC

People... please. Don't implement protocols or network servers yourself. There's about a billion http servers out there, and some of them are even good. Most popular http servers let you compile custom modules that run in the same process, which would have the same effect as Nope.c but without all the flaws.

If you need a C http implementation with a tiny footprint, grab a tiny http server that has been around for a long time (there are many) and hack on it. Busybox httpd, thttpd, boa, etc all come to mind, and there's probably dozens more. But even those support CGI, and it'll be much more scalable to not have to re-compile and re-ship and re-start your entire http process every time you need to edit a page.

Write your CGI/FastCGI/whatever app in C, compile it, and let the http server run it. It's much better suited to deal with securing the connection and handling the fucked-up edge cases of different browsers, platforms, proxies, RFCs, tcp/ip stacks, etc etc etc. As a hack, if your environment has a shell, write your CGI web apps in shell script; it compresses great, can be edited on the fly, and uses existing system resources.

I have written http server implementations. I have written boatloads of server-side applications. I've even written an entire CGI web interface and framework in C. It's fucking abysmal. Unless you're writing a hello world app, trust me, you don't want to use C.

Re: Nope.c – A web framework with a tiny footprint

#53

Post by forgottenpass » Sun, Jul 27, 2014, 11:34 AM UTC

When you cross-posted this from reddit you forgot to retain the context:

I am the developer behind nope.c: an ultra-lightweight network application platform for C language. It's early days, so, could I have some feedback please? Thanks. And, yes, the website is hosted runs on nope.c.

Sure it's buggy as hell, but it doesn't actually matter yet because the author isn't presenting it as more developed than it is.