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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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File some bugs?

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I don't generally file bugs in software that I don't use. Have no plans to use NGINX Unit and ideally in the long term there will be something better than nginx. nginx itself is pretty stagnant even though there's a lot to improve when it comes to latency and safety/security.

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Are there any companies that use NGINX and have a bug bounty program? Because NGINX is practically *the* static file server nowadays, and is used as a reverse proxy by Cloudflare too.

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nginx itself is a lot more mature and far less ambitious than the newer NGINX Unit. It still has a similar approach to rolling everything themselves but they aren't trying to provide nearly as much functionality in their traditional / legacy web server vs. the new web/app server.

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It's hard not to get the impression that they increasingly see nginx as a legacy product and don't find it to be a particularly compelling place to invest resources. They're slowly working on HTTP/3 support but it's pretty stagnant and even small improvements tend to rot.

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At least as an outsider, my impression is that NGINX Unit is intended to displace many of the use cases. It moves to a far more declarative configuration model and has proper dynamic reconfiguration via an API and other features normally gated behind the NGINX Plus product.

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It's not really a complete replacement for nginx as a static web server and reverse proxy right now... but it seems like that's the intention, and that they're a lot more interested in NGINX Unit performance, latency, scalability, etc. going forward than the traditional project.

7:48 AM · Sep 7, 2021Twitter Web App

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The code style and NIH approach in both is pretty much the same. They write highly optimized low-level code to the extreme across the board, with performance clearly as the top concern far above correctness/safety/security.

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Boggles my mind that github.com/yandex/gixy/bl is an issue for nginx and it stresses me out dealing with the configuration since so much of it is a trap allowing cookie injection or worse via URLs. I don't get why they don't at least sanity check the input to those directives.

github.com

gixy/httpsplitting.md at master · yandex/gixy

Nginx configuration static analyzer. Contribute to yandex/gixy development by creating an account on GitHub.

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