> When a TCP packet or UDP packet arrives with a particular destination port number, inetd launches the appropriate server program to handle the connection. For services that are not expected to run with high loads, this method uses memory more efficiently, since the specific servers run only when needed. Furthermore, no network code is required in the service-specific programs, as inetd hooks the sockets directly to stdin, stdout and stderr of the spawned process.
Just ask init or getty.
Init and getty are small, self-contained system demons that are part of the O/S rather than application servers inviting long-running, single address-space processes for business logic.
If you're serving thousands of requests per second, you probably need a pretty beefy server anyway, regardless of the stack you're running. Forking makes good use of multiprocessor capabilities if nothing else.
Shell scripting is a handy tool but it is also slow so you wouldn't write hot paths in shell scripts. And for the same reasons you wouldn't write busy web servers in CGI. Both are fork() heavy.
CGI is also the way the web used to work. Spawning processes has only gotten faster since then. The entire "process spawning doesn't scale to the modern web" argument is completely and totally bogus. Today, spawning a process in Linux is only 10-20 microseconds slower than creating a thread: http://www.bitsnbites.eu/benchmarking-os-primitives/
The performance problems are elsewhere.
The folks who started at a small scale in serverless but see traffic growing and kind of are in the middle space before jumping to dedicated servers have an entire art form of keeping their functions "hot" since both Lambda and AppEngine actually keep your functions hot loaded when once it's spun up for some time.
https://www.google.com.sg/search?q=serverless+warm+up&oq=ser...
Isn't the learning curve of C pretty similar or even higher than rust's if you concider all the best practices you'll have to learn and understand and use? Imho in that regard rust pays off very well (and fast), because it's compiler _enforces_ most of these "best practices" to everyone.
Let SQLite deal with it! The JSON1 extension is quite capable of parsing, extracting, sorting and filtering JSON data and by default it's enabled.
C still has some unique portability characteristics that are very hard to match in other languages. If your requirements lead you down this path, it can be done.
You rightly point out however that this isn’t a path one travels lightly. Maybe the flip side of all this is, “if you’re prepared to invest the kind of rigor into testing that SQLite has, then rock on.”
Maybe another opportunity to mention Zig again as a possible good alternative in the learning curve front? (I learned about it when it appeared recently in the HN front page)
It isn't hard to build tools like Valgrind and AFL into your C workflow. I would take that over simply taking for granted that a higher-level language was secure just because it is interpreted. After all it's probably C under the hood anyway.
Rust is a good solution, but it isn't trivial to learn, and might not suite all situations. I think it's great to have a C solution like this.