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Comment by lacampbell | Hacker News Reader

This actually looks really neat. Linear Algebra as a service, anyone?

Speaking more broadly - I hope we see more web stuff in the statically typed, machine code compiled camp. It is my understanding that web apps do more and more client side these days and only really need a "thin" server. Ruby or Python seems over kill.

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It's funny to me; when I got my first taste of "web apps" it was writing c apps to process cgi requests a bazillion years ago. It is neat to see people advocating for native compiled code in this area. I do lots of node these days and full stack so I appreciate the client side leaning for routing and rendering. If you don't need SSR then I'm sure you could create a very performant server in rust or c. Sounds fun!

SSR?

My guess is Server Side Routing.

Server Side Rendering

Ah ha, thanks both! Rust web frameworks can absolutely do server-side rendering, there's multiple template engines, even.

I sometimes toy with the idea of using fastCGI C++14 scripts for a RESTful JSON service, to be able to handle a lot of requests on not much hardware. Though maybe spending a lot of time shaving 10's of dollars on your monthly VPS bill is not a fantastic use of your time :D

There are some c and c++ web frameworks floating around that seem quite nice.

Web programming in C and CGI is alive and well:

http://www.learnbchs.org/tools.html (mirror: https://archive.is/d1BXC)

http://kristaps.bsd.lv/absdcon2016

CGI and compiled Scheme, over here. If you write some fairly simple wrapper functions, you can get an almost sinatra-like API: very nice to work with.

Can you share anything more? I'm very interested. Chicken Scheme?

Yes, CHICKEN Scheme. Although I imagine Gambit would work equally well. I have ~3/4 of a single-file CGI framework on my hard drive. It's feature complete: the other 1/4 is just some optimizations and sugar over GET and POST handling, as they are by far the most common methods used.

In the future, I might add some wrappers over access of CGI environment vars, but you can already look those up by hand, using the standard environment access routines.

Linear algebra as a service would be much easier using Numpy + Fortran together with a python web framework, rather than just Fortran.

No joke, I have a couple projects right now that could be described as linear algebra as a service.

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