Show HN: I built a web framework in C

Can write safe code does not mean always writes safe code. A web server needs to be safe code, always.

I'm sorry, but it's like scratching your left ear with your right hand. But for fun, yeah, there are worse things people do. Good luck and have fun. Now here's where most of us will probably be sarcastic, but it's certainly a good way to explore whatever others consider bullshit.

Edit: Pls read the following comment. I would hire him/her because I consider this as a waste of OP skills and he/she would be useful in many more projects.

TLDR; it was not a hate. I am sorry if it sounds so.

Makes sense, thanks!

Every agent I know of or use will always say they built "Production ready, secure, fast package for X" if you ask them to build that, but they rarely actually will. It takes enormous time and effort to actually do that, and any first iteration of "production ready" is definitely aspirational until it actually hits the real world and survives. I'm speaking from experience, fwiw.

You're being too kind, but I suppose your work requires diplomacy. When multiple top-level comments basically say "I can't believe the amount of hate in this thread", without adding any other thought, the thread start to feel like a simulacra of a discussion, an absurd comedy of nonsense, a deeply layered shaggy dog story.

Come on, people. Want to counterbalance negative comments? Find something positive and interesting to say. Yes, this will require actual effort, as with many things in life. You can do it!

I'm busy writing some of the most optimized-but-still-portable code that I've ever written and it is very interesting to see how even a slight difference in how you express something can cause a massive difference in execution speed (especially, obviously, in inner loops). Your code is clearly written from what your comfort zone with C is and I'm really impressed by the restraint on display. At the same time, some of the code feels a bit repetitive and would benefit from more universal mechanisms. But that would require more effort and I'm not even sure if that is productive. One part where I see this is in the argument parsing code as well as in the way you handle strings, it is all coded very explicitly, which substantially increases the chance of making a mistake.

Another limitation is that using AI to help you write the code means you don't actually understand what it does, and this in turn may expose you to side effects that you are not able to eliminate because you did not consider them while writing, it is as if someone else gave you that code and asked you to trust them they did not make any mistakes.

Apparently they are; I believe it's the indirection that gets people.

Most learners aren't really taught basics properly - they learn that a variable "contains" a value, when instead they should learn that all values have a type, and some variables hold values.

> I'm not trying to brag it took me I think like 15 minutes to grok them from learning about them the first time.

I can't remember not knowing pointers, so I can't really tell you how long it took for it to click, but I do know that I had done a non-trivial amount of assembly before I used C, so maybe that helped/.

The * vs & always gets me and not to mention if I ever have to deal with Pointer Math.

I still don't understand this decision. I think it should've been like int^ p = &i; ... or ... int i = *p;

Everything clicked ironically when I went even deeper and studied assembly language. Then following pointers to data vs just reading pointers becomes very clear and explicit.

Then when you start using pointers, it makes sense. If variable is a pointer, that means its a memory location. *variable is a way to get that data. Then arrays is just a wrapper around pointer arithmetic.

Whereas with CS, you learn about variables first, which is an abstraction on top of memory, and pointers don't make sense in this regard.

This is why any EE/ECE grads are much better developers than CS grads, because once you understand fundamentals

The problem arises when you start to mix memory management with more complex structures.

It’s extremely easy to make mistakes, and you must be very careful about ownership and clean up. Those things are not strictly related to pointers, but in C, it’s inevitable to use pointers to handle them. That's why people say pointers are hard.

I think a lot of noobs learning C struggle with pointers especially because there are no good error messages besides "segmentation fault" :D

Yes. Especially pointer to pointer to ...

The big problem is that arrays are conflated with pointers because C doesn't do slices. If C had slices, people would naturally avoid pointers except in the cases where they were genuinely necessary. That would make teaching pointers vastly easier.

Yes, anyone who has taken algorithms and data structures class in C knows that some people just don't get it.

Also the way people teach it tends to be bad, before teaching pointers you need to teach Stack and Heap at a conceptual level.

* dropping the prefix "test_" * substituting the "_" characters in the function for whitespace * uppercasing the first letter of each word.

So `test_tokenize_simple_model` becomes "Tokenize Simple Model".