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

(github.com)
127 points warothia | 1 comments | 17 Nov 24 18:12 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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dakom ◴[18 Nov 24 06:58 UTC] No.42170374[source]▶
Love this :)

Small, related anecdote: back in the year 2001 or so, this is in the same family of how I built websites...

The difference is I wrote in in C as Apache Modules. So, like, most people were using other people's C modules (like PHP or CGI), but once you dug deeper and you wrote your logic/site _as_ a C module, it was so much more fun (and powerful too).

I didn't have much of a templating language, so the answer to "can we change the text on this page?" was usually, "sure, just give me a few minutes to recompile the whole Apache server" :D

Fun times

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warothia ◴[18 Nov 24 07:19 UTC] No.42170455[source]▶
Few others have brought up Apache Modules, and they are incredibly similar to my idea. :D Did not know about them while I was developing it. The main difference as far as I could see was the fact that you had to recompile / restart the server. Which I try to avoid, so little changes require almost no recompiling.
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1. mananaysiempre ◴[18 Nov 24 16:12 UTC] No.42173764[source]▶
You might also want to look into ISAPI extensions[1,2] in Microsoft’s IIS, those are also just DLLs that the web server loads into itself, and were once advertised as the most performant way to serve dynamic stuff from it. It doesn’t look like there’s a way to request that extensions be reloaded, though: the server either unloads them at its discretion (once no in-flight requests are using them?) or not at all (if “extension caching” is enabled). But there’s an advert[3] from somebody who shimmed that capability onto it back in 2006.

(You wouldn’t have had a good day debugging these things, mind you. But it’s something that people experimented with back in the day, alongside Web servers programmable in Java[4] or Tcl[5].)

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/iis/6.0-...

[2] http://library.thedatadungeon.com/msdn-1998-06/IISRef/devdoc...

[3] https://www.iis.net/downloads/community/2006/12/isapi-loader

[4] https://www.w3.org/Jigsaw/Overview.html

[5] https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/AOLserver