> Everything about marketyour.games is modern

I can't read any of the text on that page other than the headings. Is that what makes it modern? I assume the stack mentioned in the blog post is vibe-slop as well.

It's not very clear to me why the author has chosen C in the first place. I appreciate the effort of sharing the experience with us, anyway.

A shame to hand code a project in C and then use AI to write a blog post.

It’s a cool project to test yourself but most of the benefits outlined would also apply to Go, Rust, etc, and then you also get memory safety thrown into the mix as well.

"Every request spawns a fresh process. Deploying a new version is replacing one file. That means no server restart and no downtime. New requests simply pick up the new binary."

I think that's why FastCGI exists. It is the equivalent of PHP's "Swoole" or "FrankenPHP" or "amphp" or Laravel's "octane", etc. Each process is long-lived and tries to clean up its state as much as possible between requests. Forking a new process can take around 8ms (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19005586)

When I was building https://github.com/Qbix/webserver in PHP, I was faced with forking a new process per request. I implemented fork-per-request at first, similar to PHP-FPM and then implemented the "FastCGI" approach of long-lived processes that clean up after each request. (Modern PHP has introspection so the engine can know what to clean up, before calling the php files to handle things.) However, some things are not really possible to completely reset in PHP, and you have to be careful with database connection pools, etc. Typically those are left open even by preforking processes like php-fpm.

Anyway, I ended up flipping it: use the "FastCGI" approach as a default, and if the original PHP code doesn't work (rare), then for that app, you can choose the regular CGI approach of forking a process per request. That way you get maximum speed by default, and manually opt into safety (this is an exception to my usual priorities).

PHP is actually quite fast. But I was also interested in transpiling it to C. So I built the transpiler at: https://ulanguage.org/playground ... used Claude to transform about 1000 PHP functions to their native equivalents, but if you use any of the others, it would hook into the Zend runtime and link with it. (There are some nuances with zvals and objects, and resources in previous PHP versions, but I managed to overcome them.) By the way, it also works with Node and Python FFI the same way.

You can basically now take PHP, Python or Javascript/Typescript code, and speed up the CPU-bound parts about 10-50x. A lot of that is because of string and JSON handling. Many web apps use strings and JSON a lot. So underneath, I had the compiler use "ropes" for the strings, and avoid concatenation. It also parallelizes the JSON encode and decode into code that can run on multiple cores at once, i.e. large JSON payloads are encoded and decoded in parallel. Those are just huge speedups.

Anyway... all of this is mostly focused on speed optimization, so you can solve the literally C100K problem (forget C10K) today, on a regular box. If you don't need speed or FastCGI, your approach is fast enough for the vast majority of applications.