C++: A language for next generation web apps

http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=95

by TomasSedovic • 16 years ago

104 95 16 years ago

"Also, as often overlooked by anyone over 30, you have to handle UTF8 to Unicode conversion, but this is easily achieved in a 10 line function."

lol.

olliesaunders• 16 years ago

I had to read that a few times. What is he talking about?

tedunangst• 16 years ago

    1     wchar_t *
    2     utf2wide(const char *utf)
    3     {
    4        size_t len;
    5        wchar_t *wide;
    6        len = mbstowcs(NULL, utf, 0);
    7        wide = malloc(sizeof(*wide) * (len + 1));
    8        mbstowcs(wide, utf, len);
    9        return wide;
    10     }

jrockway5• 16 years ago

Excellent satire.

aphyr• 16 years ago

I thought so too, until I got to the part where he claims it's running rhymebrain! Still can't figure out whether he's joking or not. Naw, on second reading, definitely sarcasm.

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

I missed the <sarcasm> tag.

coderdude2• 16 years ago

He forgot to encode the character entities.

astine• 16 years ago

From the article:

I gave a tongue-in-cheek talk on how C++ can fit in to a web application.

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

The thruth is, my company maintains a C++ we application. It's implemented as an Apache module and employs some very interesting in-memory shared structures.

And, like I said, I missed that part.

It was not proper markup ;-)

alfredp• 16 years ago

if you're on an embedded device, this is actually not a satire

Avshalom• 16 years ago

on that note does anyone know of an ansi Forth (or fairly portable at least) server that's reasonably robust.

csmeder• 16 years ago

http://colorforth.com/haypress.htm

I'm not sure if this falls under the robust category or.. sever :) but it supports forth and has total of 360 computers running at 700 Mips or 250 Gips

kls• 16 years ago

Which is a very valid point, I have never understood why organizations that need massive scalability for simple, stateless, distributed apps would not pursue such a course.

techiferous4• 16 years ago

So, serving web pages from an embedded device? Have we finally got to the "your washing machine is on the Internet" era? :)

branden• 16 years ago

It's not exactly Facebook, but I've seen plenty of small network-connected appliances provide web admin interfaces. Routers are a common example, I've also used network console servers that do this.

maurycy2• 16 years ago

I can't wait for the RESTful API for my alarm clock, and washer. ;-)

tptacek• 16 years ago

I've worked on a lot of embedded devices with web services, and it seems pretty typical to just run a JVM and serve web pages out of it.

The few times I've seen actual web stacks done in C++, the end result has been... comedic.

loup-vaillant• 16 years ago

Current embedded devices are likely to have at least 256Mb of RAM, 4Gb of Flash, and as much MIPS as a Pentium III. Not so "embedded" any more, don't you think? If Portability is an issue, then I am likely to use C with something like Lua. But I can't imagine for a second abandoning garbage collection before I see proof I can't afford it.

coderdude2• 16 years ago

I think he does a good job of humorously pointing out the difficulties involved with writing a C++ Webapp, but I don't doubt that he's serious about the performance characteristics being a good thing.

derefr• 16 years ago

It's perfectly sane to write web services (computationally heavy processes accessed via REST) in C++. But for the algorithm-light, marketing-heavy frontend to such a service, use something easier—the optimizations C++ offers aren't worth it there.

Devilboy• 16 years ago

I don't have any experience with it, but I'm under the impression that MSVC / C++.net has all the goodies you'd need to do the easy frontend stuff also?

flatline• 16 years ago

Sort of - I don't think that the web templates and CodeDom are there like they are for VB/C#. It's also kind of a mess going between managed and unmanaged code, which you'd be doing extensively if you want to use the System.Web namespace. Managing references on the managed heap is an extra hassle that has a fair amount of complexity. To top it all off, the support for the managed C++ extensions has been lackluster.

yummyfajitas2• 16 years ago

To be fair, after coming back to C++ after years in the world of Python and Haskell, it's not as bad as I remembered.

C++ is actually a moderately effective functional programming language. With reasonable knowledge of the standard data structures, and using BOOST, one can actually write fairly expressive and effective C++ code.

Most of the time, I feel like all I'm doing is writing a much more verbose version of Python. The rest of the time, I'm hunting nightmarish segfaults and segfault and template errors.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

Oddly enough I'm back to C++ too, after Ruby.

One nice thing is; in a fast language, tests run quickly too.

Also, Python and Ruby don't have the equivalent of an ASSERT (you could roll your own but it's not standard practice).

Also, C++ has standard hash lists and complicated data structure are actually going to run quickly.

And while memory management can be a pain, you are doing it yourself so you can track down memory leaks rather than having them be inherent in the interpreter...

...as in Ruby AND Mono.

hazzen• 16 years ago

C++ doesn't actually have a standard "hash list" (I assume you meant hash map or hash set?). Depending on your implementation, you either have hash_{map,set}, unordered_{map,set}, both, or something entirely different. tr1 specified unordered_{map,set}, but tr1 is only technically a proposal, not a standard.

I think a safe assumption is that tr1::unordered_{map,set} will be available in all implementations by now, but until C++0x is ratified and implemented by major compilers, you will run into different platforms having (possibly) different implementations. And lets be honest - even after C++0x has been implemented in major compilers, you will still have subtly different/buggy implementations.

edit: I had conflated {hash,unordered}_{set,map}. Fixed

ubernostrum• 16 years ago

Also, Python and Ruby don't have the equivalent of an ASSERT (you could roll your own but it's not standard practice).

Ahem:

http://docs.python.org/reference/simple_stmts.html#the-asser...

icefox2• 16 years ago

RubyOnRails is very test gunghu, but to run a hello world test takes seconds, anyone know why? This seems very odd. Is this one of those do what I preach, not what I do things?

SamAtt• 16 years ago

The question isn't "Can C++ work?" or "Will C++ be faster?" because we all know it can work and that it will be faster. The question is "At what point does the extra development time become more expensive than just adding another server to my Ruby/Python/C#/Whatever App"

For me, someone who learned C++ in school but has been in managed enviornments ever since, I'd be too scared to use C++. I'm not ashamed to admit I get a lot of help from the Internet when I'm stuck on a problem and that help is available because everyone else is using the same tools I am. Using C++ to code web apps puts you out in the wilderness as far as I'm concerned and I just don't think I could do it.

techiferous4• 16 years ago

"because we all know it can work and that it will be faster"

Speed of execution depends more on the programmer's expertise than the language used.

spamizbad• 16 years ago

And it's not just the dev time: with C++ (and C, and any notorious unsafe language..) you've got to be extra diligent about security, which uses even more time, and requires expertise not just in C++ but also how to write secure software in low level languages... a skill many C/C++ devs lack, unfortunately.

abrahamsen• 16 years ago

Your experience with Python and Haskell has most likely made you a far better C++ programmer than you were before.

yummyfajitas2• 16 years ago

This is absolutely the case.

I'm now used to first class functions, currying, etc. C++ actually has them, hidden in the stl and boost::function. Whatever I can't do using those, I can usually do by creating a family of classes which only implement operator() (I've only needed to do this once or twice, and it might have been avoidable).

Due to using a language with native dicts (and syntactic sugar), they are now part of my vocabulary. This means I immediately reach for std::map or boost::unordered_map when it makes sense.

Similarly, python generators and haskell lazy lists have made view sequences as reasonable objects to generate and iterate over. Custom iterators are just the same thing with added verbosity.

If I never used higher level languages, I'd still be treating C++ as C with objects.

capablanca• 16 years ago

So, what is great, modern C++ code to read?

jbarham3• 16 years ago

It's a book but Accelerated C++ by Koenig and Moo has been well reviewed.

m0shen• 16 years ago

Reminded me of this: http://code.google.com/p/madfish-webtoolkit/

tlrobinson• 16 years ago

"MySql is GPL'd, so you can't even link to its client library in a closed source app."

AFAIK it's GPLv2 (and not AGPL) so this is only true if you intend to distribute your application itself, not just host it yourself.

lemming• 16 years ago

I believe it does however mean that your application code has to be GPLv2, and thus can't be linked to code using some popular licenses, for example Apache 2.0.

theycallmemorty• 16 years ago

Anyone else remember ISAPI?

I still use it. Every day.

It really isn't as terrible as you'd think.

miloshh2• 16 years ago

The reason why dynamic scripting languages are more appropriate for web applications than C++ is simply that the bottleneck is somewhere else - namely, the Internet is slow enough to make the performance of the server-side code irrelevant. That can very easily change in the future.

barrkel• 16 years ago

Roundtrip latency is certainly going to add up to a substantial chunk of time, but that's not much excuse to discard performance considerations. Requests that take say 50ms of processing will take even longer if the box is busy; it doesn't take much to add up and becomes noticeable.

And if your implementation on the server side is very fast, you can do more.

miloshh2• 16 years ago

My point was indeed that performance can matter, and will matter even more in the future, since no apparent technological limit on network speed has been reached so far.

tweiler• 16 years ago

Was anyone else let down that this was a sarcastic thing and not real?

Imprecate• 16 years ago

Check out OKWS (http://www.okws.org/doku.php?id=okws) if you're interested in developing webapps on C++.

reedlaw2• 16 years ago

Why believe it's satire? He's got an actual app already deployed and a full history of blog posts demonstrating his knowledge and interest in this field.

reedlaw2• 16 years ago

Here's a link to the C++ code for his app: http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=8

d0m• 16 years ago

I thought at first that the article was sarcastic :-| I mean, what's taking time is not whether you use ruby python or c++ but the http request, request to the DB, IO or javascript loading..

And anyway, the part that really need to be optimized can still be done in C even if you use python.

There was a time I was a C++ guy who wanted to control memory and everything.. but now, I've got other things to do. If I can write 1 line that is more readable and cost less to type, why should I use C++ ?

And by the way, C++ isn't a verbose python. And, even if I once thought that boost was the best thing ever made, I feel that it's a waste of time. Instead of using meta-programming hacks to use lambda in a clumpsy/ugly way, why not simply use python or scheme ?

gphil• 16 years ago

> I thought at first that the article was sarcastic

This article definitely is sarcastic.

akadien• 16 years ago

I just drank a couple of Pliny the Elders with my neighbor, and now I read this. My head is definitely spinning now.

ozten• 16 years ago

Ending up at C++ because of design constraints is understandable... starting there is idiocy.

icefox2• 16 years ago

Language {x} would be good as a next generation web app if there was web app libraries. Typically those are not {x}.

aditya• 16 years ago

IIRC OkCupid uses a webserver and application stack that is all C++

Ref: http://www.okws.org/doku.php?id=okws

badsectoracula• 16 years ago

For a two to three years i was running in a VPS server in VPSLink which had about 64MB of RAM - for everything and without swap space. The target use of this VPS was probably as an email server or something as most people recommended the more expensive 128MB and 256MB plans for serving (static) pages. And actually there were only about 40MB left since the OS needed some memory for itself too.

Personally i thought that with better resources management i could do much more, so i wrote a custom HTTP server in that could fit in less than one MB of RAM. Most of my pages were generated offline using a custom program in FreePascal.

The server could also execute CGI scripts, so i also wrote a forum in FreePascal.

According to my logs, the whole system ran out of memory only once :-). Until the day i decided to give myself a little more features (when i got a much better VPS from Linode) i had about 5-6 sites running (different domains), a Subversion server and a few "dynamic" apps.

The forum can be found here. I still run it in my new VPS, although it got some spam. The a + b = ? anti-spam feature was new when i wrote the forum but seems that bots got better :-P.

http://www.badsectoracula.com/projects/mforum/

birger• 16 years ago

Interesting to see that you used FreePascal! We are also experimenting with FreePascal and (fast)CGI. My collegue put up some sample pages: http://services.cnoc.nl/lazarus/index/fclweb

fudgie• 16 years ago

Way back in 2000, when we launched Planetarion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetarion), we used C++ with a custom webframework, and CORBA for communicating with the database.

At our peak late in 2002, we served about 320 million dynamic webpages a month using three desktop Pentium 3's for webservers, and a dual CPU P3 for the database. No caching, as that wasn't needed.

Blazing fast, and not all that difficult to work with once the basic framework was solid and in place.

spektom• 16 years ago

He's lying, C++ apps are not portable.

metamemetics• 16 years ago

Let's say C++ can code be executed OVER 9000% faster than python.

However this does not imply a web app written in C++ will run even 1% faster than a web app written in python unless the performance bottleneck is code execution.

If the performance bottleneck is instead the database server (which it almost always is) then choosing C++ for your next webapp would be a _very_ masochistic premature optimization.

brazzy• 16 years ago

What has not been mentioned at all: how C++ webapps will spell the end of XSS and SQL injection as hackers refocus on the much more interesing but almost-forgotten buffer overflow vulnerabilities.

Oh joy!

coliveira2• 16 years ago

Such vulnerabilities still exist in PHP, Python and Ruby, because they are written in C. And they are much easier to exploit because almost every web app uses one of these languages.

jbarham3• 16 years ago

Nonsense. Just because the Python interpreter is written in C does not mean that you can overrun Python strings and smash the stack like you can w/ C strings.

geirk• 16 years ago

If this guy is really running his web server on an Acer Aspire One 512, as he says at http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=71 C++ sounds like an excellent choice.

bad_user• 16 years ago

He does have a point about efficiency, or about delivering a single app ... but you also get those advantages with a Java, or a .NET, or even an Erlang or Haskell app which are reasonably efficient ... and still, you won't have to deal with segfaults.

Also, if you want extreme scalability, like being able to serve 10000 requests/sec on a single server ... sorry, but raw performance doesn't cut it ... see this article for instance ... http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html.

Not to mention that the most usual bottleneck is the database (how many apps can you build that doesn't use one?). So even if you build the fastest web server in the world, if you're using a RDBMS you're going to end up with 100 reqs/sec, unless you're sharding or caching that data.

The bottom line is ... if you want extreme scalability, I don't think C++ is going to cut it, and you're going to invest a whole lot more in optimizations that are already done in more mature web frameworks.

Well, unless you have Google's resources and skill.

joubert• 16 years ago

Objc is probably a better candidate because it is so dynamic?

s-phi-nl• 16 years ago

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1046516

  Web apps in Objective C --- the second-least safe programming language
  on the market. Oh please, oh please, build your next huge application
  in this. College tuition for my kids is freaking me out.

protomyth2• 16 years ago

That has got to be the dumbest thing I have seen in quite a while. "Smalltalk is garbage-collected. ObjC deals in raw memory addresses. It's actually less secure than C, as I see it" shows a level of fail that is beyond explaining.

protomyth2• 16 years ago

I do sometime wish Apple would bring back the original WebObjects framework with EOF. The Java version is not much fun.

C++: A language for next generation web apps

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