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

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127 points warothia | 6 comments | 17 Nov 24 18:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.234s | source | bottom
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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. SvenL ◴[17 Nov 24 19:56 UTC] No.42166628[source]▶
On the other hand memory management in web applications is quite easy. Most of the stuff is only required for the lifetime of a request. Some stuff needs to be available the whole application life time.
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2. smt88 ◴[17 Nov 24 22:45 UTC] No.42168057[source]▶
You can do this with other languages (C# for example) as well. Memory is so cheap, though, that most companies should spend their money on increasing memory rather than on paying programmers to optimize memory usage.
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3. HexDecOctBin ◴[17 Nov 24 22:57 UTC] No.42168124[source]▶
Cheap for whom? American programmers with FAANG salaries, or an under-funded third world NGO?
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4. SvenL ◴[17 Nov 24 23:13 UTC] No.42168203[source]▶
Yes, for most use cases it doesn’t really matter which language is chosen.

Regarding just spending more money on memory - I agree that it’s definitely cheaper but it’s not only about wasting bytes of memory. If the garbage collector has a lot of work to do it may also impact response time/throughput.

And yes, C# did a pretty good job with implementing mechanisms for reducing allocations on a language level. This definitely helps to reduce garbage collection.

5. marginalia_nu ◴[18 Nov 24 01:31 UTC] No.42168940[source]▶
I don't think memory usage is the problem, but rather allocation costs and memory layout, i.e. performance.

Serving web traffic simply isn't a very memory hungry task.

6. kaba0 ◴[18 Nov 24 11:14 UTC] No.42171416{3}[source]▶
Both. My phone could easily serve thousands of concurrent users.