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Show HN: A dynamic C (Hot reloading) module-based Web Framework

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127 points warothia | 5 comments | 17 Nov 24 18:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.416s | source
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gwbas1c ◴[17 Nov 24 19:44 UTC] No.42166517[source]▶
Important question: Why would anyone develop a web application in C? Typically web applications lean heavily on garbage collection and memory safety, because their bottlenecks are very rarely CPU/memory issues. The ROI on manually managing memory just isn't there for a typical web application.
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1. warothia ◴[17 Nov 24 19:54 UTC] No.42166611[source]▶
I could say speed, but the main reason for me is because it is fun. And I like to see what I can make C do. :D
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2. mst ◴[18 Nov 24 09:05 UTC] No.42170880[source]▶
"Because I can" remains an entirely legitimate reason for a hobby project.

If anything, you've gone further along the "also (at least sort of) practical" scale than I expected.

Given as mentioned elsewhere a per-request arena + bump allocator system, it might actually be -genuinely- practical (to the extent that writing application logic in C is at all ;)

Bravo.

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3. warothia ◴[18 Nov 24 09:12 UTC] No.42170903[source]▶
Thanks! Yes, an arena allocator for each request is on my todo list. Just didn’t get to implementing it yet. :D
4. kaba0 ◴[18 Nov 24 10:56 UTC] No.42171335[source]▶
The second point is absolutely fair and your project is very cool and impressive, but the speed one is misleading. I am fairly sure you actually leave a fair bit of performance on the table simply by how convoluted parallelism and async IO are in C, and something like Java might easily outperform it in standard CRUD backend use cases.
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5. warothia ◴[18 Nov 24 11:41 UTC] No.42171572[source]▶
You’re absolutely right, I have not tried very hard to optimize for speed either yet. To comment was more directed at the fact most just say that “speed” is the main reason to use C, but for me it’s almost exclusively for the fun and “cool” factor.