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nginx 😱 seriously ffs if you want to write C, stop making these bloated NIH'd libc replacement frameworks that get everything wrong (unsafely wrong even)

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Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Sep 7, 2021

Replying to @DanielMicay @saleemrash1d and 3 others

I think they got tired of people still using LAMP and decided outdo Apache by turning nginx into an in-process library/framework for a bunch of different languages. Basically the unikernel thing but with web servers. They just need to make it an OS now for maximum hype.

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They want performance at all costs and apparently that includes avoiding anything from libc and making a whole bunch of hand-rolled sketchy performance-oriented code full of free lists, arenas, lock-free data structures, custom threading, etc. Lots wrong from glancing over it.

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and

I don't really understand why they even make wrappers for memcpy (nxt_memcpy), etc. Some sensible concepts for a lot of what they do but the implementation is so sketchy and unnecessarily hand-rolled. NGINX Unit isn't some experimental / beta project. It's production code...

2:38 AM · Sep 7, 2021Twitter Web App

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and

It's amusing to me that you can find scary bugs in a lot of projects from simply doing git grep -P 'alloc\(.+ \* .+\)' in lots of projects. It's hardly the scariest kind of thing in that codebase though. I think I'll have to go with their custom fiber code as the scariest part.

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It's the "portable runtime" mentality. Same reason glib has gint. Misguided belief that plastering their prefix everywhere makes better code rather than gratuitously dependent code.