Web development in C: Crazy? | Hacker News Reader

Web development in C: Crazy?

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187 pointsdysoco201 comments

So, 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 on all fours and beg to be owned.

Yes, I mean that 100% seriously. If you're smart enough to safely write that C code, you won't. If you aren't smart enough to write that C code safely... and the first clue that you aren't is that you think that you are... you don't stand a chance. It's suicidal.

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.

If you have not already and can do so, I highly recommend adding Dtrace to your C development toolkit. Dtrace, Valgrind, and GDB make rooting out C runtime issues a lot more pleasant and complement one another well.

Indeed. It's a pity DTrace is not available in Linux (there are two ports, none work for real work). It's also a pity DTrace in OS X is starting to bit rot.

I don't know where the problem is, I use http://gpo.zugaina.org/dev-util/dtrace on Gentoo without a problem.

A clean room reimplementation of Dtrace is on my list of ideal computing wants that will probably never happen.

Also on the list is everyone targeting the same hypervisor for device drivers (such as Xen) so that hardware support is excellent for all operating systems and all devices.

I would really, really like a clean room reimplementation of Hexray's IDA pro so that I can use it on OS and architecture, an LLVM front end for Plan 9/Inferno OS, a clean room reimplementation of ZFS, GNUstep to have at least a 1:1 implementation of Cocoa so that no matter the OS and architecture one can target that GUI kit and we have inter-application reuse of functionality through scripts like we have for CLI apps, and a clean room reimplementation of AutoCAD and Candence's Orcad.

And as someone who uses a CAS or equivalent environment a lot, I would really appreciate if an ecosytem such as julia, ipython, or octave would reach and exceed Mathematica and Matlab in ease of use, degree of combination and semantics possibilities, and power as well as efficacy.

I really would like to be able to use Plan 9/Inferno OS all the time but developer tools are not comparable to any BSD or Linux ecosystem and there is not a good GUI toolkit available (I would like GNUstep here is why I want the implementation to succeed).

People who can reverse engineer software and hardware is a very small population compared to the res of the dev population though and they are very likely to end up in a lawsuit if they try.

> It actually worked, once I spend 20 hours in valgrind

Thia is exactly the main problem with C.

You need to rely on tolling outside the language to be able to write safer code.

While languages like Ada and Modula-2 and their descendents, offer the same hardware capabilities as C with stronger type checking.

We use C# which allows you to write safe code. However, people still manage to fuck it up at an implementation level often enough for it to cause high risk problems.

I do mostly JVM and .NET based development nowadays, in consulting projects.

Sometimes I wish to be part of a C or C++ based project, then I try to imagine how the quality of our offshore guys would map to those languages and realize how lucky I am not to be part of such projects.

Yeah very good point. Our offshore guys can't even get c# right :)

Don't you do something wrong, when you consult the company to use (more) offshore guys? I thought that a company is best led, when developers share their knowledge cooperatively and ask their managers to outsource unimportant time-consuming things like api-/file-/conversions, legacy code support, CSVs …

(Disclaimer: Don't get my tone wrong please, I'm asking not suggesting, thus I respect your experience.)

That's what is supposed to happen but the MBA asshats use it purely for cost cutting...

Most consulting projects in Fortune 500 companies end up with outsourcing the whole project department to the consulting company, in the cases where IT is not the main business.

Oh, I didn't know that it's so extreme.. thanks for reporting back, I appreciate it :)

We actually used c in ~2000 in our web company (one of the biggest in our country at that time). Even the finnish EU commission site ran on C platform that I wrote. Oh the days..

This makes me wonder, are there any decent (military grade?) web frameworks for Ada?

Are you aware of Ada Web Server (AWS)?

http://www.adacore.com/adaanswers/gems/gem-29/

One of the big items on my todo-list is to play a bit with aws (the Ada web server):

http://libre.adacore.com/tools/aws/

I've no idea what the architecture is like, but being Ada, I'm pretty hopeful it delivers some nice guarantees (or at least hefty promises) regarding reliability.

An hello-world example web server:

  https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Libraries/Web/AWS

An outdated, probably flawed (aren't they all) benchmark:

  http://wiki.ada-dk.org/aws_vs_node.js

If nothing else it seems to indicate that aws isn't hopelessly slow.

There's also awa - the Ada web framework. I've yet to play with it, but it would appear to be relevant:

  http://code.google.com/p/ada-awa/

According to a stack overflow answer[s], Ada also comes with a spitbol-package, allowing you to use spitbol/snobol rather than regexpes for pattern matching. See eg the bottom of:

  http://www.adacore.com/adaanswers/gems/gem-26-2/

[s] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5904053/web-programming-i...

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.

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?

glib: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLib

There are others. Basically, if you wrap your dangerous C app in a thin, impenetrable layer of solid string processing and input validation, it's very manageable.

Valgrind and input fuzzing help considerably to work out any bugs.

> Still an order of magnitude easier not to shoot yourself in the foot in most higher level language.

There are some best practices that tend to help you to limit the risk a lot. Still... a lot of people do web development in JavaScript, and I'd cite it as a very strong exception to your assertion.

> Pretty sure you still have to use plain arrays and strcmp, what are these "safe" libraries you were going to use?

Pretty much all of the "NULL terminated" functions have a length terminated equivalent that you can (and should) use instead. There are also blob & string abstractions available that wrap arrays and strings in structs that have fields to track the size of the allocated space, with the side benefit of making C's evil type coercion a bit harder to bump into.

> Also C supports unicode fine

Particularly if you use ICU4C, C actually has the best unicode support out there (obviously there is ICU4J which gets merged into Java regularly, but often you get stuck with an old VM with an ancient version). It's actually kind of shocking how painful it is to have full unicode support with higher level languages that really ought to know better.

> 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

Not only does PHP have one, but Java has since forever (http://www.beanshell.org/), and .NET really kind of does have a few semi-reasonable options (http://www.linqpad.net/, http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/SnippetCompiler/, http://www.mono-project.com/CsharpRepl, not to mention: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb978526.aspx).

Of course, so does C (http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cint, http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cling, http://www.softintegration.com/products/chstandard/, and arguably even things like https://code.google.com/p/picoc/ or http://ups.sourceforge.net/main.html can serve if you are desperate).

> Pretty sure you still have to use plain arrays and strcmp, what are these "safe" libraries you were going to use?

So, thought it would be worth giving some examples. By far the lowest level solution are things like strlcpy & strlcat, which basically still live in a NULL terminated world by try not to be stupid about it:

http://www.gratisoft.us/todd/papers/strlcpy.html

There are some specifically targeting strings and making them both more efficient and safer:

http://bstring.sourceforge.net/

There's more sophisticated runtimes like glib or APR, which almost seem like they are trying to completely replace the C runtime, but they provide very clean memory management interfaces and string & blob/block abstractions that allow you to avoid having to worry about a buffer overflow.

Then there are solutions built on top of the likes of that. Things like the GGSK: http://gsk.sourceforge.net/

There's lots more, but it's late and I'm tired. ;-)

For strcmp, the safer strncmp version?

Also you should compile your app with apparmor and run it under grsecurity.

REPL like behaviour you can get with gdb. :)

> Still an order of magnitude easier not to shoot yourself in the foot in most higher level language.

I would argue that C's lack of robust string concatenation encourages most people to avoid concatenating strings at all costs. Most DB libraries support bound parameters, which would be much easier to use than constructing an arbitrary sql string in C. So, I would argue the tendency for a competent C programmer is to do the safe thing rather than the lazy thing other languages make easy that exposes you to SQL injections.

Along with that, most scripting languages are written in C. I know a lot of people who have written PHP extensions in C. This article seems to suggest that no one does any web development in C, when almost every large company I know of does so, even if it is just to speed up slow parts of their app by adding new functions to PHP.

You mean like this?

https://github.com/tyler/Bogart/blob/master/bogart.c#L53

I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong there...

To be fair, it looks like a "get it working" proof of concept, but I certainly wouldn't take that into production :)

The author explicitly says it's not intended for production in the README:

> This code has every security flaw you imagine, tons of memory leaks, and when I wrote it I may have been awake for much longer than one should be when writing C.

On the other hand, if your development turnaround time is measured in seconds (due to fast compiles from a good toolchain) it really doesn't matter what you're programming in. C with a good set of libraries backing it up is probably just fine.

I'm not sure it's that cut and dry. For one thing, PHP itself has vulnerabilities, as do its flagship apps. These vulnerabilities are easy to scan for, because the default configuration advertises that it is there and what version it is. If you're worried about some kid running scripts or idly scanning, you're probably in better shape with a custom C program than with a widely-used PHP program, even though the custom C program is likely to be more fragile and crumple more easily under actual expert attention.

are you actually arguing for security by obscurity?

No, I'm saying something more subtle than that, which is why I used four sentences instead of three words.

I use C every day, and I wrote a whole framework for writing websites in C (no longer maintained because I'm no longer that interested in writing websites):

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.annexia.org/freeware...

What was amazing was that you could write pretty complex dynamic websites that fit into a few K of RAM and could trivially handle huge load.

I originally wrote that framework for a chat service. It ran for years on a single 32-bit CPU box with 128 MB of RAM, handling the chat requirements of dozens of English schools.

Unexpectedly popular comment :-) A bit more background:

- It used a scheme for cooperative threading that is similar to coroutines. This meant you could write straightforward code and all the event driven stuff was done automatically behind the scenes.

- Parallelism wasn't so important back in 2001 but you could also do that by forking N reactors (one for each core).

- There was a C string library modelled on Perl. It had lots of string management, vectors and hashes. Buffer overflows were effectively made impossible by the string handling library.

- UTF-8 was used throughout and it was fully i18n-able (using getttext).

- Template library.

- There was a pool-based memory allocator library (similar to Apache's APR / Samba's talloc). Effectively you didn't have to worry about memory allocation at all except in some rare corner cases, mainly when you wanted to store something in a global cache.

- All persistence done through PostgreSQL using a Perl DBI-like library. SQL injection was impossible because it used prepared statements.

- There was a rather experimental system built on top of this that allowed you to embed widgets in webpages so you could write very interactive stuff without using Javascript (something of a concern back in 2001, not so much now). It maintained the widget state transparently across page reloads. AFAIK no one has every done anything like this before or since.

It was, to some extent, a bit crazy that I wrote all of the above in about 6 months, but I was being paid a lot of money, working at a very disfunctional company that was on the verge of going out of business, and didn't have much else to do.

> If you're smart enough to safely write that C code, you won't.

That's one of the best things I've read in a last few days.

Using that same logic we shouldn't use C for anything, because we might make a mistake.

I wouldn't use this not because of possible mistakes leaking in, but because the higher-level languages have already solved some of the problems you would have to solve yourself, such as handling unicode. There are C frameworks you could use but my point is that you would come across problems that have already been solved, and you would have to solve them again, but this time for libCello.

Now that's for production and work. To mess around on my own time? Sounds like fun to me. C is my favorite language but I use it everyday programming mobile devices so I'm probably a little unusual. Maybe a little website experiment or something. If it goes down or gets owned, rebuild time.

And we shouldn't use C for anything, if it can at all be avoided, because the likelihood and aftermath of mistakes are enormous.

I disagree completely. But again, I use it daily. The performance and footprint benefits of C outweigh the negatives, which are basically summed up as - it's too much power.

It's entirely possible to have a language that is precisely as performant as C, but significantly safer. Several exist as well.

It's too little safety.

Then by that logic, you shouldn't use a Computer, because the likelihood and aftermath of mistakes are enormous. :) c'mon, don't be that close-minded.

Good summary. The answer to the question in title would be: yes.

> 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 succession of "segfault-y" and "arbitrary-code-running" software such as Apache and Linux.

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 "arbitrary-code-running" software such w Apache and Linux

The vast majority of C programmers are much less skilled than Apache and Linux developers.

>They were too dumb to understand that they were writing unsafe C code

"Too dumb to catch vulnerabilities in their code" is a much wider category than "too dumb to learn anything else [besides C]". You're not really providing an example of the second.

>The vast majority of C programmers are much less skilled than Apache and Linux developers

So we agree that at least some C developers can write consistently safe code. So a person is not necessarily "not smart" just because of this language choice.

> it's often processed by a succession of "segfault-y" and "arbitrary-code-running" software such as Apache and Linux.

If your web code has ~20 years of security audits and fixes it's probably perfectly safe to use it. If you're adding large new features under tight deadlines I don't recommend it.

Just addressing the OP's point that "if you're smart enough to safely write that C code, you won't".

Did you even seriously try it before you came up with this highly opinionated post.

> So, people can't hardly write safe web apps in PHP without...

I've said it before, but it bares repeating:

PHP is C for people who shouldn't write in C... or PHP.

Yeah, nobody would let anything important rely on an application written in C. Like apache or nginx. Or postgresql. Or your whole operating system. That would be crazy.

At 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.

Maybe if we'd had some better abstractions, it wouldn't have been as painful, but C code written to do a lot of ad hoc string cobbling is, in fact, a little crazy.

Despite this, the product pretty much worked and actually had a few hundred customers and a future.

(We even got looked at by Yahoo, but they bought some outfit named Viaweb instead.)

You should have used lisp :p

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.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

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).

I don't see it as a talent filter proxy. More of a "Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs" proxy.

e.g. You run a skyscraper building company. If you see job ads for competitors with things like "must have excellent woodworking knowledge" you are probably less worried than those with "must have excellent metallurgy knowledge".

> I don't see it as a talent filter proxy.

That's fine. I was characterizing how pg was using it.

> Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs?

I think it is actually a much poorer proxy for that. Maybe if they are a small company or don't have any engineers, that would make sense. As a company gets larger, job descriptions start to represent very small, specific parts of what a company does, and the internal context of the company often outweighs the importance of the external context that is visible to you.

As an example, when Facebook was still up and coming and had real competition, Facebook were the ones hiring C programmers, not their competitors... ;-)

Ah I considered the second bit in the historical context.

The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry.

> The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry.

Consider yourself surprised then. ;-)

Actually back in those days a lot of the web industry was just doing integration with existing systems, which means the tech stacks were as varied as those existing systems. Even when not, it was the wild west. You tended to have a lot of experimentation, false starts, and general insanity. Heck Apple had a really good run with a server-side Objective-C development framework! Impressive systems were built fairly easily with Perl (and later PHP), Smalltalk, C++, VBScript, Python, LISP, and then there was AOLServer stuff (TCL!), and that's ignoring some of the proprietary language developed specifically for the web... At any given company you'd probably find somewhere between 2 to 5 of those. Sure there might be a dominant language, but there'd be specific needs for people with skills in any of those languages.

There was one sign you could rely on to know a company was not on top of their tech stack: the gratuitous licensing of proprietary Java application servers. Open source, and in some cases even proprietary, servlet engines made a lot of sense for some places, and Java application servers could often make sense for enterprise solutions that needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the web world, but all too often you'd see these companies paying tens of thousands in licensing fees for technical capabilities that not only were not of use for them, but _would actively hamper their efforts_.

I actually was a Java consultant at Sun during some of that era, and I often would arrive at client sites and feel an overwhelming need to smash my head against the wall until I forgot what I'd seen.

Google still does primarily use C++.

Google is so huge now, I'm not sure if that is really something that you can state unequivocally. The search engine and a lot of the plumbing that everything is built on top of is written primarily in C++, but there is a TON of both Java and Python code there (and that's not counting things like Go and specialized languages like the infamous Sawzall).

Back in the day (particularly before they started doing ads), almost everything was C++.

Not only that but the scale of Google drives decisions that may not make sense for the rest of us.

If you ever worked in the enterprise environment of Fortune 500 companies, they are actually quite understandable.

Only tools, one-offs, and small internal products at Google can use Python. In general, for production it is disallowed (with exception of YouTube). They learned with YouTube that Python doesn't scale well to hundreds or thousands of developers. Even Mondrian, the code review system started by Guido and written in python, was replaced by something more scalable.

> Only tools, one-offs, and small internal products at Google can use Python.

Also YouTube (you may have heard of it).

> with exception of YouTube

Oh, you have. ;-)

You didn't mention java though... there's a TON of stuff in Java at Google.

Yeah, I'd say Java and C++ are about equally prevalent at Google. A lot of the older products and core infra is still C++, and a ton of new stuff is Java (See: Android).

Given the choice C++ is way better than C, given that it allows to use higher level abstractions and replace all unsafe C heritage by library based safe constructs.

Of course, the best option would be to replace them by other languages with native compilers.

However at the level these languages are used, it will only happen when OS vendors push new languages for their OS.

So it will never happen in UNIX land or Mac OS X land.

In Windows land, Microsoft is pushing for C++ and C++/CX, maybe C# if they ever decide to offer a full native compiler, like the Bartok one.

The embedded market OS vendors are all about Ada, C and C++. A few do offer Basic, Pascal and Oberon, but are very small niche.

So there isn't any OS vendor left that would push new system programming languages for their OS.

For business programming, there are already plenty languages to chose from.

> Given the choice C++ is way better than C, given that it allows to use higher level abstractions and replace all unsafe C heritage by library based safe constructs.

You may have noticed that C++ is not always deemed universally better than C. What language are all the top web servers implemented in?

C has library based safe constructs as well, and C++ still has all of C unsafety. You just get to exercise those bugs at a higher level of abstraction.

> Of course, the best option would be to replace them by other languages with native compilers.

I think that is anything but clear. Certainly the option of doing so has been around. You just don't see a ton of big moves that worked out well.

> However at the level these languages are used, it will only happen when OS vendors push new languages for their OS.

Most OS's actually have a pretty small API footprint (Windows being the obvious outlier). If it were really just about the language bindings, it would not be a real impediment. A language runtime can abstract out the OS (as the C runtime does).

> So there isn't any OS vendor left that would push new system programming languages for their OS.

I'm going to claim this could well be a function of Darwinian forces.

> You may have noticed that C++ is not always deemed universally better than C. What language are all the top web servers implemented in?

Apache and nginx => C

Tomcat, Jetty => Java

IIS => C++/C#

> Most OS's actually have a pretty small API footprint (Windows being the obvious outlier). If it were really just about the language bindings, it would not be a real impediment. A language runtime can abstract out the OS (as the C runtime does).

If developers aren't forced to use it, then they won't use it, even if made available.

> I'm going to claim this could well be a function of Darwinian forces.

That is my hope, after all we only need a few generations of developers and then the issue is taken care of by itself.

> Apache and nginx => C > Tomcat, Jetty => Java

Okay, if you are going to throw in Tomcat & Jetty, you should also throw in the likes of lighttpd, mongrel2, etc., all of which are written in C. Pretty much all the load balancers/reverse proxies are written in C too. Hmm.... is it maybe possible that it isn't always better to use C++ instead of C?

> IIS => C++/C#

Yup, the one outlier no doubt owes about 0% of its success to its tech stack. In general, if you don't work at Google and want a C++ web server on anything other than Windows, you are looking at a C++ server framework that has an embedded HTTP stack (tntnet, Wt, etc.).

> If developers aren't forced to use it, then they won't use it, even if made available.

I know. I spend all my time watching them because if I don't they just start doing everything in assembly.

> That is my hope, after all we only need a few generations of developers and then the issue is taken care of by itself.

I think you missed my point. ;-)

> > Apache and nginx => C > Tomcat, Jetty => Java > Okay, if you are going to throw in Tomcat & Jetty, you should also throw in the likes of lighttpd, mongrel2, etc., all of which are written in C. Pretty much all the load balancers/reverse proxies are written in C too. Hmm.... is it maybe possible that it isn't always better to use C++ instead of C?

No, they were developed by open source Linux guys that only care about C in what concerns compiled languages.

C++ was always badly received by the Linux community, in contrast with commercial UNIXes.

> IIS => C++/C# > Yup, the one outlier no doubt owes about 0% of its success to its tech stack. In general, if you don't work at Google and want a C++ web server on anything other than Windows, you are looking at a C++ server framework that has an embedded HTTP stack (tntnet, Wt, etc.).

Yes, nothing like contributing to have more insecure servers around.

>> That is my hope, after all we only need a few generations of developers and then the issue is taken care of by itself.

> I think you missed my point. ;-)

I surely got your point, but it is not about Darwin of languages, rather of developers.

> No, they were developed by open source Linux guys that only care about C in what concerns compiled languages. > C++ was always badly received by the Linux community, in contrast with commercial UNIXes.

You mean like KDE, Firefox, OpenOffice, OpenCV, VLC, bitcoin... heck even gparted is a C++ app.

The kernel developers obviously have a bias against C++ (and they'd argue that it is a justified bias). User space is a different land.

> Yes, nothing like contributing to have more insecure servers around.

? Not sure your point here...

> I surely got your point, but it is not about Darwin of languages, rather of developers.

My point was about Darwinian forces applied to language or developers.

I was responding to your point about OS vendors not being left around. It would appear that, for whatever reason, going with something other than C or C++ for your base OS doesn't seem to result in good survival odds.

>> No, they were developed by open source Linux guys that only care about C in what concerns compiled languages. > C++ was always badly received by the Linux community, in contrast with commercial UNIXes.

>You mean like KDE, Firefox, OpenOffice, OpenCV, VLC, bitcoin... heck even gparted is a C++ app.

>The kernel developers obviously have a bias against C++ (and they'd argue that it is a justified bias). User space is a different land.

I use Linux since 1995, and was for some time a Gtkmm contributor in the early days.

I know how it feels to be a C++ developer in Linux land.

> I use Linux since 1995, and was for some time a Gtkmm contributor in the early days. > I know how it feels to be a C++ developer in Linux land.

The GNOME crowd was self selected to be a bunch of "C not C++" bigots. The KDE community was quite different (even if MOQ is an abomination ;-). The only community I can think of that would be more hostile to C++ is the kernel devs.

I don't think your experiences are accurately reflective of the larger community. Particularly as C++ has improved (really, pre-gcc 3.0 there wasn't a good C++ compiler, and pre-2000 hardly anybody understood RAII, so C++ was kind of a pain), the larger community's attitude has changed. You can see this reflected in the success of the Boost project.

Coming from Turbo Pascal background I tend to be very critic of unsafe by design nature of C and C++. Specially given my focus in compiler design during the university, which allowed me to have a broad focus and experience in many languages, the average HN crowd might not be aware of.

Having said this, I was already coding in C++ in MS-DOS around 1993 (Turbo C++) and only used plain C when forced to do so.

So I have been part of the C++ community since the early PC compilers were available, and experienced this C vs C++ for quite some years now.

The funny part is remember the performance complaints back then about C and C++, that nowadays people state in HN about languages trying to replace them.

Oh, and I really like Boost.

> C has library based safe constructs as well, and C++ still has all of C unsafety.

The problem C's lacking one of most important primitives - data structures.

Bugs in standard library happen pretty rarely, I guess. So, C++ users have most common data structures for free.

And when I open some C-based project's code the first thing I usually expect and see is some homegrown linked list and/or map implementations (of SIGSEGV fame). I know, there are tons of libraries that offer them, but in my experience of "hey, that server crashed, could you figure out what went wrong"-type tasks, they're very rarely used.

> And when I open some C-based project's code the first thing I usually expect and see is some homegrown linked list and/or map implementations (of SIGSEGV fame). I know, there are tons of libraries that offer them, but in my experience of "hey, that server crashed, could you figure out what went wrong"-type tasks, they're very rarely used.

Fortunately, C++ developers just always use the STL because it is considered the bastion of all that is good in collection classes:

http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/avoiding-game-crashes-relate... http://engineering.adap.tv/2012/03/29/why-we-use-c-without-u...

Don't get me wrong. I love C++ and use the STL by default, but it's all too rare that I look at a decent sized C++ project and see anything different from what you'd expect if the project were written in C.

I wonder if we will get a GTL a la guava :p

You mean like: https://code.google.com/p/cpp-btree/

Of course he would be worried, because at the time there was a total of 17 Lisp hackers in the world to go around ;)

WHYYYYYYYYY

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 dependence. VMs and interpreters are the essence of dependence. So those with this mindset always seek find a way to do it in plain C when they can.

> VMs and interpreters are the essence of dependence.

I find that an odd perspective. If you can rewrite your VM/interpreter from scratch, are you really dependent on it?

I guess I see it less as "use some black-box language runtime to solve this problem" and more as "I will use plain C to solve this problem... by writing an interpreter in plain C for a good DSL to solve this problem in, and then writing the solution in that DSL. But, you know, someone else already did the first part. I'd do it myself if they hadn't, though."

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...

Replace "disappear" with "cannot be trusted to not be owned by NSA" and someone might actually take a stab..

> 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.

Except modern processor architectures are no longer a one-to-one correspondence between Assembly code and C.

There has never been a one-to-one mapping (rather one-to-many), but it's still perfectly possible to transform C into assembly by hand. It's not even that difficult.

Yes, back in the old 8 and 16 bit days, it was pretty much one-to-one for most use cases.

Nowadays not any longer if you want to write code that takes advantage of branch prediction, speculative execution, cache lines, vector units, GPGPU ...

Just watch this Going Native talk on how sometimes generating code that is 4x bigger than the direct translation can yield up to 30% performance increase.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/2013/Compiler-Co...

Auto vectorization can be impressive, but it applies to hard numerical code, not so much in regular code bases. I regularly debug assembly in my job, and in the vast majority of cases it's a fairly straightforward translation of the C/C++ code. Stuff like cache locality or using the GPU is still determined by the C code.

I'll concede there's more fine variations to think about than with an 8-bit system, though, with the padding, etc.

Maybe your problem is CPU-bound. Maybe there are good C libraries that solve your problem. Maybe you just want to learn C better. Maybe you have latency limits you need to work within. Maybe you just want to be contrary. Sometimes "why not" is worth more than "why."

Pretty much any decent language has a way to call out to C. I wrote a portion of a book on Tcl's C API, for instance, and it's very easy to farm out computationally intensive work to C code, as it is in Python, Ruby and most other things, one way or the other.

I suppose a response to the spirit of the remark as a whole rather than one exemplary detail would be asking a lot.

The spirit of using C for web applications is: it'd be faster and simpler just to publish your root password and IP address to the web.

Insights like these are so rare. You must have worked really hard for them.

> Maybe your problem is CPU-bound. Maybe you have latency limits you need to work within.

Unless you have lots and lots of time to spend micro-optimizing everything, you'll get better performance writing in Haskell.

> Maybe there are good C libraries that solve your problem

Maybe, but most of the original post is about how lacking the library ecosystem is. I can well believe that you might have some useful domain-specific libraries for the backend, but that calls for writing a backend service in C (and using something like thrift to call it), not "web programming in C".

> Maybe you just want to learn C better.

If you try and learn on a fake problem you'll pervert your learning. Web development is not amenable to idiomatic C (Cello is a good example - it's not appropriate to the sort of problems C is appropriate for, and if you learn C based on using Cello it will not make you a good C programmer).

> lots and lots of time to spend micro-optimizing everything

If you're an experienced C developer you know what's fast and what not (and you know about things like cache coherency). You don't spend that much time on 'micro optimization' because you know how to layout your memory in the first place, etc.

>Unless you have lots and lots of time to spend micro-optimizing everything, you'll get better performance writing in Haskell.

This is just not true. Haskell is terribly (3x,4x) slow comparing to C for the most trivial of computing tasks. You can probably get it to 2x or 1.5x by giving up all the lists and other default data structures as well as writing everything in procedural (by monads) way. If you do all this you can get close to C performance but you just gave up all the advantages of writing in Haskell in the first place. And you are still slow as hell.

You are just saying the equally wrong thing on the opposing side. You can get to 2x without giving up anything. Lists are just a data structure. So are vectors. You don't give anything up to choose one or the other, you pick the right one and use it. You do not write "everything in procedural (by monads) way" to gain performance. Do notation is literally syntactic sugar, and there is no "perform faster" monad to do it in. Haskell code gets to 2x C speeds the same way C gets to 1x C speeds: profile your code and fix the inefficiencies.

"Unless you have lots and lots of time to spend micro-optimizing everything, you'll get better performance writing in Haskell." [citation needed]

> Unless you have lots and lots of time to spend micro-optimizing everything, you'll get better performance writing in Haskell.

This is stating the case too strongly. Performance wise, the naive, unoptimized solution in Haskell (ex. using the default String type instead of Data.ByteString, number crunching using lots of iteration\recursion) is going to be much slower than than the naive, unoptimized solution in C or Lua. However, for a given subset of the range between "zero" and "micro" levels of optimization, for a given problem, Haskell may still represent the local maximum.

ByteStrings are not the alternative to Strings! Text is.

Spending the same amount of development time as the naive, unoptimized solution in C or Lua would take will get you something more performant than the naive, unoptimized solution in Haskell.

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.

If you need a lot of C interfacing go with something that interfaces well with C. Like Lua.

Or, C#? ;-)

Sometimes it is hard to beat just doing it in C.

I've done it. The use case was settings web pages on an small wifi audio device. Using a few hundred lines of code more was in all respects preferable to trying to fit some other language runtime into a 6 MB budget.

And I don't know why it would need to be so horrible to program web in C, once you have abstracted out common web tasks, using them is as simple as using them in any language, just call a function.

Maybe he's doing it for fun? There doesn't have to be a reason for doing it.

For a CRUD app, of course it doesn't make much sense and you'd probably have to be a masochist. :) But there are valid use cases I can think of: Anything that's very CPU intensive that would need to run very quickly: dynamic image generation, or something that does a complex series of operations on user input that needs to delivers the results ASAP.

Of course it's usually easier and safer to just throw more CPU at it, but at a certain scale that might get too expensive...

I've done a number of projects that were web-oriented in C and C++ over the years, and they are by no means my primary language. It wasn't that bad, especially if you take the time to learn how to do string manipulation properly (which isn't really that hard).

Come to think of it, even though we consider C to be "low level", that's really only a temporary problem that solves itself the longer you work with it and the more you build with it. It's a site different issue than the opposite issue of Ruby and PHP, which will never be able to have quite the raw performance of C.

It's a bit like the difference between fast-food and gourmet. Yes, fast-food American burgers is probably easier than fast-food... French ratatouille. When you're employees are barely passed childhood and not particularly trained in the arts, you'll bet your business on the burger (RE: the similar bubbles in the gastro-pub market vis technologicalist startup). But a practitioner at the top their game will do wonderful things with either.

> It wasn't that bad, especially if you take the time to learn how to do string manipulation properly (which isn't really that hard).

It's hard in the way that counts: It's tedious and prone to precisely the kinds of errors humans make when a task is tedious. Worse, string manipulation is precisely where all of the potentially dangerous bugs can live in the average C program, especially if you're accepting data from untrusted sources.

> Come to think of it, even though we consider C to be "low level", that's really only a temporary problem that solves itself the longer you work with it and the more you build with it.

Aside from the fact you can say the same about assembly, this is another reason to disfavor C: Reinventing the wheel. Over and over again.

I say all this as someone who actually likes C, and even somewhat enjoys doing string processing in C. I even know about strstr(3), which never seems to get mentioned. The main thing I know, however, is that it isn't worth it unless you live in a contrived circumstance.

Yes, you can go really fast by strapping yourself to that rocket, and if you remove the helmet you'll reduce your weight and go even faster. Nobody's doubting you. However, very few people want to stand downrange of you.

I wrote a little backend section in C once to do a FFT on some data and it ended up being 7 times faster or so than the perl the rest of the backed was written in. It made sense there.

Developing a whole CRUD app in C however? Seems like it would feel like digging a swimming pool with a spoon.

> I wrote a little backend section in C once to do a FFT on some data

yeah, this kind of thing is what i thought the article's title meant and was going to say "no, actually quite common," but then read the article. and given the choice between "crazy" and "crazy like a fox," i'd say "crazy like a fox, but still crazy."

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 own: speed kin to C with safety significantly exceeding that of Python and Ruby. Users of Python and Ruby may find the parts of its type system which must be specified explicitly arduous, but it does make it ever so much more likely that code that you write just works, correctly, which (as primarily a Python developer) I have found marvellous.

Rust isn't there yet for web development, but solid support for the HTTP layer is well in progress: https://github.com/chris-morgan/rust-http. When that's far enough along, then I'll get on to the framework I have in mind.

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 statically typed languages.

I fully agree with you!

Personally I use Julia+C for my backends. Haven't decided which language to use for the front-end though, but probably just javascript, python or php.

The impression that I at least have got of Julia is that it's designed specifically for technical computing (mathematics, science, etc.) rather than general purpose programming as Rust is. I think that would be likely to influence what people use it for significantly? That could be a pity, because Julia does look like quite an interesting language.

Rust's REPL, rusti, is presently broken, but it will be being fixed up later.

I presume Rust's safety will also go beyond Julia's, with its algebraic data types and lack of such things as null, and its rigidly checked type system.

Disclaimer: I'm a Julia core developer

Julia's type system is very similar to Rust's. Julia has composite types, type unions and parametric dependent types. It is certainly designed with technical computing in mind, but that does not at all limit its ability to do general purpose programming and in fact can help significantly in high load situations. I personally have done more general purpose programming in Julia than I have done technical computing (and in fact, it's focus on technical computing was one of the least important reasons when I decided to become one of the Julia core developers). You have a good point that the ability to do easy technical computing certainly will influence the initial audience, but, I think, as the language matures, this will shift towards a more general audience.

There are hardly any benefits in writing your web app in C ove r Java or Go. That 1% speed increase is nothing compared to the huge amount network wait these apps will be doing.

If you really consider it, what 95% of people write these days is glue between various services, and the parts that do matter, where you need the most performance, are already written in C. The reason why Redis, MongoDB and Postgres have good C bindings, because they themselves are written in C.

So when it comes down to it all you are really doing is string parsing and string transporting, thats really the last thing you want to leave to C. I haven't done straight-C code that has required me to do a lot of string manipulation, but I guarantee I'll probably leave a buffer overflow exploit open when trying to parse GET variables.

Or I can just do it in Java, and get all the performance and almost all the advantages of doing it in C.

> If you really consider it, what 95% of people write these days is glue between various services, and the parts that do matter, where you need the most performance, are already written in C.

I think that is absolutely on the money?... but what if you are building one of those components?... or what if you are writing a very thin wrapper on one of those components, and it is brand new and only has C bindings?... or what if you need to be portable to dozens of different platforms, many of which don't share much toolchain overlap except for gcc?

> but I guarantee I'll probably leave a buffer overflow exploit open when trying to parse GET variables.

It's pretty easy to avoid that if you are worried about it. There are buffer/blob abstractions that give you "safe" interfaces with 0 risk of buffer overflow. Really, there is no good reason to have those unless you really are trading safety for performance.

> Or I can just do it in Java, and get all the performance and almost all the advantages of doing it in C.

Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. It depends on the problem... and your levels of skill with both Java & C.

C and C++ compilers can produce faster execution than Go or JVMs as they support SIMD vectorization e.g. SSE/AVX. For CPU-bound workloads you can get more than 2x speed up.

It doesn't mean you should write your entire server stack in C vs calling a C function for heavy computation, but the idea that Java and Go approach 99% the speed of C/C++/Fortran is generally only true for programs that are not optimized for performance.

> C and C++ compilers can produce faster execution than Go or JVMs as they support SIMD vectorization e.g. SSE/AVX. For CPU-bound workloads you can get more than 2x speed up.

This is an implementation issue.

Nothing prevents a compiler vendor to offer the same capabilities to their language compilers.

Vectorization is not part of ANSI/ISO C or ANSI/ISO C++.

For the time being, do you want vectorization in Go? Write a tiny assembler routine. Done.

JVM? They are working on making it part of the reference JVM http://openjdk.java.net/projects/sumatra/.

.NET? While Microsoft does not offer anything, Mono has SIMD support since 2008, http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Nov-03.html

It's an implementation issue that matters if you're writing a system that needs to offer high performance today.

Regarding writing assembly - that's fine, you could also write a routine in C and call it. The thrust of my comment is that it is untrue to argue that native Go and Java match the performance of C/C++. They don't. They might in the future.

In the majority of cases they do. For a few minor cases where they don't (but they are close to) you can drop to C or assembly.

sumatra is for parallelizing mainly on GPU, not for SIMD - current C/C++ compilers neither do that. Java has SIMD support for quite a long while now, probably since Java 6 or even earlier and generally C-like Java code using raw arrays and primitives is as-fast-as-C these days. I'd be more afraid of lack of true value types in Java. This one thing makes C still a better choice for high performance stuff.

> I'd be more afraid of lack of true value types in Java

The IBM J9 VM already has them.

http://duimovich.blogspot.ca/2012/11/packed-objects-in-java....

http://www.slideshare.net/mmitran/ibm-java-packed-objects-mm...

Modern JVMs do support SIMD vectorisation now and I've seen at least one example where JVM outperformed GCC 4.5 in loop vectorisation by 2x. There is no reason JIT compilers cannot do all the same SIMD optimisations that static compilers do.

If you want really top performance for non-trivial cases, e.g. matrix multiplication, I guess you need to probably vectorise by hand and go down right to assembly level.

> So when it comes down to it all you are really doing is string parsing and string transporting, thats really the last thing you want to leave to C.

Exactly. String parsing is the biggest shortcoming in C that always gives me a second thought when I'm about to choose a language for a higher level application (especially if it incorporates user input as strings). Even such trivial thing as AT command parser is a pain in C. Of course, there are parser generators as Bison, but still it's tedious amount of work and usually not worth it.

I wrote a small (~300 line) C program to scrape an email and insert the part I wanted into a Postgres database. I used PCRE for the extraction and ECPG for the Postgres part. ECPG stands for embedded SQL in C for Postgres, and it looks like this:

    // Open the storage subsystem.
    void open_storage()
    {
      EXEC SQL BEGIN DECLARE SECTION;
      const char* database = DATABASE_NAME;
      const char* username = USERNAME;
      const char* schema = SCHEMA;
      EXEC SQL END DECLARE SECTION;

      EXEC SQL WHENEVER SQLERROR CALL quit();
      EXEC SQL CONNECT TO :database USER :username;
      EXEC SQL SET search_path to :schema;
    }

ECPG: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/ecpg.html

My takeaway was that it was a lot easier than I expected, but it was still kind of a minefield. ECPG isn't widely used or highly intelligent, so there are a lot of stumbling blocks despite the pretty high quality documentation. I would recommend hiding your ECPG behind some functions so you only have to run some of your files through the pre-processor. But it is a neat tool and I could see myself using it again.

This made me curious! Why did you do this? To create a database of "signatures" to be used in your contact-list?

No, I signed up for the xe.com daily currency exchange rates email and it occurred to me I could build a database around it. So now I have daily exchange rate data going back a couple years. Thankfully they haven't changed their format. They have a service you can pay for if you want to download this data in bulk but I was being cheap and didn't really have any particular use for the data.

Source code: https://bitbucket.org/fusiongyro/exchange_rates/src

Thank you! I am curious about the trade-market too

If you find a bug, please let me know. My C is probably pretty poor. Thanks! :)

I've always found it interesting that OkCupid is built with C++, although they started it before 2001. http://www.okcupid.com/about/technology

OKWS is interesting to study because it's one of the few Staged, Event-Driven Architecture (SEDA) websites in well-known production use. Max Krohn's 2004 paper describing the design of OKWS is excellent reading[1].

With the rise of VMs, jails, containers etc it should be much easier for general webapps to adopt this architecture.

[1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~max/docs/okws.pdf

Why C? Performance. I wrote a C webserver on a PIC32MX795F512L (80 mhz/ 128kB RAM), and it was _screaming_ fast (for what it was running on). Easily handled ~100 clients making 2-3 requests/sec continuously to a JSON based API (I really don't know how far you could push it before it got slow), which is respectable for that chip ... but this was written to the bare metal with no OS (did use libraries for IP/TCP/HTTP/JSON, though). C isn't my first choice for web development either, but there's absolutely no way you could pull that off in a higher-level language.

Modula-2, Turbo Pascal, Ada...?

... Haskell...?

I was just listing some languages that were designed as system programming languages as well.

But any language with native code compilers, that is able to have small footprint executables would do.

You think? Cpoll[1] is actually on top of the techempower web framework benchmark [2]

onion to be honest looks more like a http server generation framework. similar to what rob fitzpatrick was talking about when he was advocating gos net/http. but then again what do i know i haven't tried any of them.

Personally, even though ruby makes my salary I like C. Always did. Treefrog looks the most like a modern web framework to me. [3]

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpollcppsp/

[2] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

[3] http://www.treefrogframework.org/documents/tutorial

Treefrog is coming in Round 7 [1]. (And sorry, we still don't have an ETA for Round 7 but we are hoping for this month.)

[1] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/pull/283

Might anyone looking for a speedup akin to C do better to look at Go instead?

Or Haskell.

yes

I would second this. Go has enough batteries included that you can write nice little web things with the same basic development experience you get in python or ruby or php. It's really quite wonderful.

i'd say ocaml or one of the faster schemes, though go isn't too bad a choice either.

Any language with native code compilers will do.

I'm mainly a C dev and I would never ever use C to write a web app. Not because I don't think it could be done, not because I don't think it could be done well but simply because string manipulations in C are a pity. Containers which are not dumb arrays in C are a pity. SQL bindings are much more tedious than the higher-level languages counterparts (I wrote quite a bunch of C interfacing with SQLite, it works well but requires a lot of LoC compared to perl for instance).

Basically 90% of what you do in a typical web framework in your scripting language of choice becomes 10 times more tedious and error-prone in C (and probably 100 times faster but frankly, who cares?)

It's already painful when I need to write sysfs and debugfs interfaces (and the linux kernel has a pretty nice API to write in those).

The only reason I can imagine for using C in a web app is performances but then:

1/ I would try to profile my app and see where the bottleneck is. If it's really CPU-bound and C would really help I'd try to write a small C library for this particular piece of code and bind it in my scripting language.

2/ If I really must write the whole thing in C for some reason I'd try to push for a subset of C++ with at least std::string, std::map, constructors and destructor to ease ressource management and maybe exceptions for error handling. Done well you'll get similar performances and with a bit of luck you might actually come up with something remotely maintainable.

A lot of embedded systems have web configuration interfaces written in C. For example, your wireless router's configuration page is probably written in C.

True that. I've written a few Web interfaces for embedded devices in C. That being said, I now try to use Lua along with C for projects of this type. It all really depends on memory and performance requirements.

I was once part of a team on a project that we wrote an embedded webserver that we compiled in all the html, images(converted to c arrays), css and js, into a single binary so that we wouldn't have to read from flash to load those resources for speed boost and less flash access.

I've learned now, that given the target hardware and resources, that wasn't really necessary...

Router configuration pages are usually awful. With string handling being an awful pain in C, it might explain why my router only does validation in javascript (thankfully, it means I can disable it when it is wrong).

It all depends on whether you've got a compelling reason to or not.

For us it was a simple decision, we have a mature stable product[1] that's written in C. So the path of least resistance is to write out own web framework (from scratch to avoid IP infringement problems). Sure it took time, a lot more time than grabbing something written by someone else, but that's not how it works everywhere (especially in corporate environments). Now we've got this library it makes adding HTTP client/server stuff to any of our C binaries relatively easy.

Likewise string processing in C isn't a problem once you've got a suitable library built up; ADT libraries (no I don't need to implement my own buggy hashtable again and again), regexp wrapper libraries, etc. They also help maintain consistency across platforms (our product ships on 6 different platforms including Windows).

If you're looking for instant gratification then C isn't the right language for you but a huge amount of the Internet is built on the back of things written in C. Are webservers (Apache, nginx) written in C similarly crazy? No.

Of course, it needs someone to write a solid C HTTP framework and then open source it so that it can be maintained/improved, now that would be useful. Sadly our employer has no plans to release ours, which is a shame but I have no control over that.

1. Coming up 20 years old now and >$1.5bn in revenues over those years, not too shabby.

Reasons not to use C for web dev: 1. Maintenance costs will go through the roof with C. C developers are not cheap, and most people who use C have are not web developers. 2. Hiring will be exceptionally painful. Again, most C devs are not web devs. Put another way, most web devs use other languages. 3. Some C developers are so good that very few people can understand their code (Linus talks about this, and I've seen it happen at a prior company)

By way of personal experience, in '99 we had an outstanding developer who was a rock star in C. When he left, I remember sitting in a meeting when an A+ developer (he really was good) was asked by the VP Eng, "Can you support his code". The response, "No". VP Eng: "Why is it not commented?". Response, "It's commented. In fact it's the best code I have ever seen. But I cannot support it, it's amazing, but its way beyond my skill level."

I have never seen a repeat of this experience in a 4th gen language. I'm sure it can/may happen, but have not yet.

Although we try not to talk too much about it, many users of Varnish Cache actually use it "because it is the easiest way to get a C layer in our web stack".

Others are proud creators developing web sites in it using both VCL (which is compiled into C) and C directly through VMODs or Inline-C in VCL. More:

* https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/users-guide/vcl-inl...

* https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/reference/vmod.html

* https://www.varnish-cache.org/vmods

* https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/VCL

I once inherited a website written in C. I actually tried moving it to PHP but the server was hitting a rogue MySQL instance with a file socket and I couldn't find a PHP API to handle it.

There were two things I did that actually made it pretty painless to work with: I implemented a Dreamweaver template processor that you could hook up to output a string or execute a block on each template element. I also implemented a preprocessor that allowed injection of large HTML blocks:

    for (int i = 0; i < n; i ++) {
        [[[<tr><td>(((i))). {{{strings[i]}}}</td></tr>]]]
    }

It's an interesting exercise, but as soon as I left they scrapped it for something maintainable.

Doug Crockford at the TC-39 panel last night talked about how one of the most exciting things about JavaScript is that its a wildly successful general-purpose programming language that "doesn't have to look like C to be successful."

His point was that we used to live in a software ecosystem where the conventional wisdom was that if a programming language didn't look like C, it wasn't going to take off. JavaScript (and even more so variants like CoffeeScript) are showing that we've moved on from that sentiment.

In some ways, this article feels like a retreat to that older assumption. As if we somehow are expected to be searching for ways to work C into the modern web app landscape. Perhaps this point may somewhat orthogonal to the topic of the article and the related discussion, but I can't help but ask what problems are we solving by going back to C for web development? Is the assumed performance gain going to outweigh all the other benefits of using a higher level abstraction?

None of the framework examples listed in the article really seem elegant at all when compared to higher level counterparts (Rails, Django, Spring, et al). Of course, I'm saying this without having attempted to build an application with any of them.

JavaScript is a C-like language though. It looks like C. It borrowed its syntax and even many of its keywords.

Also, in some of his earlier talks he said that it looks familiar to C or Java developers (because it's a C-like language) and that this perceived familiarity is the reason why most people don't bother learning the language.

I don't want to start a language war here but as a phd student working on distributed systems, choice for "C" as a language for developing high throughput web applications has some rationale. For instance, when you read most of the articles in HS.com or C10K at least, web development at large-scale requires every performance bit out of machine. Indeed, some -caugh-google-caugh- still use C++ at backend (even not in the frontend) or we see twitter switched to JVM from RoR for performance.

For regular earthlings, RoR, Py, PHP and alike are still more feasible than C for "getting the job done".

But the article's point of view is a bit shallow in that sense, since it's looking a way of replacing conventional frameworks (RoR etc.) for C. If you gonna develop a high-perf application in C, you probably use more wide variety of specialized libraries for focused tasks(like json processing, I18N, handling SSL, developing nginx/HAproxy modules,extensions for load balancing, etc.) rather than using a single "C framework".

The Fossil DVCS has a built-in web interface for reviewing commits, along with a bug tracker and a wiki. It's all written in C, albeit with a couple of custom macro preprocessors.

I once wrote a toy web page in C; Lex made for nice HTML templating and with pseudOO it actually felt pretty modern, but I still wasted a whole lot of time reinventing various wheels.

Thanks for the reminder about fossil. I tend to forget that it's all c (and therefore, must contain a wiki in c). Reviewing in that code base added to todo...

Well, C++ already has a couple of web frameworks : http://cppcms.com/wikipp/en/page/main

http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt

I'm not sure that's a good idea though. It's hard to fail safely in a language that can fail silently. And failure modes include, not just blatant hacks into the underlying system, but surreptitious insertion that can propagate to all your visitors.

Besides the fact that it's pretty hard to find a decent C developer these days who's also interested in web development, you have a climate that's not exactly conducive to development in it. If it breaks or needs upgrading, will you do the work yourself? If it's that small, then it's probably not something you'd worry about too much, but then it's only on your shoulders.

Also, OKCupid is written in C++.

See this link for more details on that : http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~max/docs/okws.pdf

If you do want do do it in c, I think php pretty much got it right -- write an extension in c, and use something else for the rest. Se eg: http://phalconphp.com/en/

Then there's of course G-Wan -- source of a lot of speculation, and frequent border-irrational (counter)claims by it's author -- but undoubtedly a good contender for easy-to use server with c-language "scripting":

http://gwan.com/

A newer server in the same space is nxweb, which seems made for doing the kind of work the article talks about - simple, high performance web-services in c:

https://bitbucket.org/yarosla/nxweb/wiki/Home

For other languages, have a look at hello-world webservers at rosetta:

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world/Web_server#C

Other related projects:

mongoose - small embeddable, cross platform web server w/lua scripting: http://cesanta.com/

lighttz - webserver in c using libev: http://arekzb.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/lighttz-a-simple-and-...

Still, if it were me, and I needed "c-speed", I'd probably go with cgi (or fastcgi). Forking on every request might not be the absolute fastest, but with the binary cached in ram, it's still pretty fast on Linux. Or maybe just use mongrel2 and a c handler:

https://github.com/derdewey/mongrel2_c_handler/tree/master/l...

Why? If you want the speed of compiled code you can come very close with .Net or JVM based solutions.

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.

This is a nice summary, and the links are handy reference for the subject.

Security concerns aside, I've occasionally used small C routines in web-app CGI calls, and often wondered if others have gone further with C and web development.

You can have the best of both worlds by writing low-level modules in C for use within a higher level framework.

For example, I've been having a great time writing this music player backend in C[1], but as soon as it's solid I'm going to write a node.js addon module and then use that as the backend for my web-based audio player[2].

[1]: https://github.com/superjoe30/libgroove

[2]: https://github.com/superjoe30/groovebasin

Sure, cool stuff and probably great fun doing it.

However what matters in web development is not performance, nor that it is bug free and not even security. All of those things can fixed one way or the other on the server with more hacks.

The one thing that matters is speed of development, that is why PHP rules so hard.

"Let's argue about whether Haskell or Clojure is better while somebody else ships products using PHP and duct tape."

https://twitter.com/agentdero/status/174965036928868352

But that comment is such a transparent and absurd red herring that it is an insult to your intelligence to repeat it. People talk about PHP too. That doesn't stop them from shipping products using it. Talking about languages has absolutely no detrimental effects on writing code.

Did you understand my point how web development works?

Web development is fundamentally different from application/system development.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur

You missed to mention Duda I/O:

   http://duda.io

On this case this framework target web services, you can do web development but the goal is to be a fast HTTP/Websocket stack instead of a friendly MVC renderer.

Even is do in C, i tries to present a friendly C API as you can see in http://duda.io/api, if you think into a fast big data server front-end, Duda I/O fits pretty well. A few slides:

    http://duda.io/slides/

hehe, yeah duda and MonkeyHTTPd ftw. ! Been using both and many other webservers including nxweb for a quite some time now for trial. I do webdev in C and Julia for the Backend.

The main problem, I think, is that web development usually requires lots of string processing, and the C standard library makes this complicated and opaque. Maybe Cello helps with that?

No, not crazy. Just really tedious. I've been there and even webdev in C++ was magnitudes more comfortable than webdev in C.

But webdev is a solved and trivial problem. More so it is an I/O-bound problem. So you can use the slowest language in the world as long as it boosts your productivity or makes your life super easy. (Sure, there are edge cases but 99.9% of webdevs never will be in the situation of having thousands of requests a second.)

We wrote Bloglines, the first and greatest RSS reader web app, in C. And by "we" I mean Mark Fletcher did, and the people he hired like me, continued it.

It wasn't bad. You just get used to keeping track of memory, arrays lengths and pointers like you do anything else. While I do prefer Python these days, I always enjoyed the looks of horror Java and PHP programmers greeted me with when I mentioned our language of choice for Bloglines.

If you want to make an Arduino serve websites, you'll have to write embedded-C commands that write HTML to browsers and can interpret POST commands.

I would like to add that apart from being professionally chosen or not, this sort of opens up a way for learning web dev concepts for those who learned programming with c as the first language. They just get to see internals of all libraries quickly rather than having lots of frameworks with no easy access to source to see what is going on underneath. Good idea.

It seems like if you want to get the performance benefits of C with web development, that's something you can do, but it does seem downright crazy to try to do it all with C. Use something safe and abstract as glue and for talking to the client, and use C for any heavy lifting, if the benefit can justify the extra work.

i been working with ntop, its a web interface written in C, the HTML is embedded within the C code. As a rails/php developer this is kind of crazy :P Heres the source https://svn.ntop.org/svn/ntop/trunk/ntop/httpd.c

Hehe, this looks similar to some stuff I've worked on with embedded devices.

The reasons for this [that no one uses C] aren’t terribly difficult to discern. Let’s face it: compared with higher-level languages, C is hard. Like, objectively hard

So.. instead of leading with one of the many, many great reasons not to use C, he pretty much calls everyone too stupid to make it work.

The worst abomination I've worked with was a web app written in PL/SQL. It was lovely to maintain.

"And when was the last time you wrote a function that returned 1 or 0? If you’re a Rubyist or a Pythonista or a server-side JavaScript devotee, you may never have done so."

That's just returning True or False (bool). Lot's of people return that from functions in all languages.

I 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

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.

While that may be true for the short term, what about the power, maintenance, storage etc costs that recur? I'm not sure a C dev's pay is equal to the running costs of a server farm...

People constantly repeat that, but I never see it actually be true. I frequently see people spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on hardware and hosting costs just to save $5k of developer salaries. Just because they have internalized this notion that "hardware is cheap, developers are expensive", and don't ever actually look at the numbers.

In the early days when Perl was the CGI de jure the company I worked for wrote their cgi in C and ran on Zeus webservers. This was for performance on one of the most highly traffic'd sites at the time.

Cgit is written by C and it's quite easy to develop with a fairly clean code base:

http://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/

Sorry using C is a security nightmare. You need to use a higher language like C++ that can encapsulate and abstract your web-framework enough.

Or use a C framework that has secure string handling and others.

Slightly offtopic, but I love Node.Native[1].

It provides an API similar to Node.js using C++11 lambdas.

1. https://github.com/d5/node.native

Also worth mentioning, a Websocket server library in C. https://github.com/m8rge/cwebsocket

Sounds like a fun side project. But I would not risk doing such thing for money - support would be a nightmare. And by the way, wasn't that what Go was developed for..?

He forgot the use case for C web development. Small embedded systems. Not everything is CRUD.

libfcgi (C) + postgres worked like a charm for me. There are also things like libmicrohttpd, libevent/libev, ... that are also very useful if you want to play even more. It's not that hard if you know C.

why use C? if you want to go down that path why not use C++ frameworks, like http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt ?

Weather Underground is implemented in C.

Yep. Just bat shit crazy.

Not crazy, just stupid.

Yes.

I don't think the author has offered a great argument in this article. Building a new website in C sounds like a fun learning experience, but it's not a practical choice for the typical startup CRUD app.

When you're a startup, your biggest problem 99.999% of the time isn't running out of memory or not having a fast enough app, but getting an MVP up and launched and finding enough paying customers so that you don't run out of money. Except in specialized cases where your app is very CPU intensive, C provides a major headache without a major immediate advantage.

But C is a great choice for replacing parts of your app if you start growing and when you start figuring out exactly what services need to be faster and use less memory.

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