I’ve been spending a fair bit of time writing C this week, and have to admit that I’m enjoying it more than I expected to. After spending most of the last 3-4 months fighting tooth-and-nail against Rails’ inclination to completely own every data source in my application, as well as trying to make big, memory-hungry web app server processes behave well under load, it’s been refreshing to strip things back to basics, and see my old friends char* and errno.
The specific project has involved writing a couple of plugin modules for lighttpd, which has also proven to be relatively painless. The API docs are pretty solid, and none of the bundled modules are larger than a thousand lines of code or so. (Compare that to, say, mod_dav.c in the Apache 2.2 distribution, which is 3-4x larger, and requires a half-dozen additional support files.) It actually only took about four hours to bang out the first module, and I’m proud to say it happily hooked itself into the server without the usual first-run segfaults I’ve come to expect from C code that’s using unfamiliar APIs.
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