(2024-09-09) Making pure C great again (feat. Mongoose)
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Here, I'm not going to talk about that Mongoose that has something to do with
MongoDB, I don't even know what it does. I'm going to talk about that
Mongoose that resides on
https://mongoose.ws and is an "industrial-grade"
networking library with more or less complete Web server capabilities. It's
written in pure C and compilable directly with your own sources: you just
add mongoose.c and mongoose.h to the project, include the .h file in the
source and the .c file to the list of files passed to the compiler, and
that's it. I, for instance, could not find the process as straighforward for
libhttp, which they say had been derived from Mongoose some time ago.
I've stumbled upon this library when looking to simplify my upcoming
livestream chat aggregation server to make it not use raw socket and become
more cross-platform in the future. The backend-server-frontend interaction
concept had changed several times but I still liked the idea the core should
be written in pure C with little to no third-party additions, and its
structure should be kept as simple and robust as possible. The amount of
manual work, however, began to overwhelm me and made it look not so simple
anymore, so I started to look for alternatives. And this is the one I
decided to use after all.
Of course, Mongoose does have some issues on its own: it doesn't compile with
-std=c89 (or pretty much any -std for that matter), it can throw out
"Illegal instruction" errors when compiled with -O flags (and I'm not even
sure what's to blame here — Alpine Linux, musl or Mongoose codebase itself),
and it leads to pretty heavy binaries even when no additional compiler flags
are switched on. However, despite all this, the package provided here is so
complete that I can live without -O flags and C89 compatibility. You get
your own multiprotocol networking, API server, static file server,
WebSockets, JSON decoding, string processing and much, much more in a single
place. It's adding to C almost everything that I have missed here from what
I have in Python. And it's also said to be extremely portable across various
OSes and architectures, which is quite important for what I'm trying to
achieve here.
By the way, I'm also still looking for a pure C, lightweight, cross-platform
desktop GUI library. The closest to what I want is libui/libui-ng, but its
almost non-existent scrolling capabilities make it a no-go for most real use
cases. Dear ImGUI+cimgui, raylib+raygui and Nuklear only seem tiny, but the
first two of them are built on top of OpenGL, which is quite far from my
definition of lightweight, and the third one requires providing your own
platform-dependent rendering code. In fact, the search for a sane desktop
GUI is still ongoing, but for now Web-based seems like the only choice.
Lastly, I think pure C programming is still underrated. Of course it requires
you to adhere to strict security practices in terms of memory management and
type checking, but when done properly, it rewards you with full knowledge
about the internal flow of the program and unparalleled execution speed and
resource efficiency, something that's sadly often forgot about these days.
--- Luxferre ---
