• include_next and portability

  One of the decisions I took early on while writing Lwan was to only support Linux, and think about portability later; this decision was influenced by the way the OpenBSD project approaches portability. Published June, 28, 2018

• ★ More on string switch in C

  Talking about uncommon programming tricks the other day, the subject of switching on strings in C appeared on the table. Published February, 01, 2018

• Initializing a heap-allocated structure in C

  A pretty common mistake that happens when programming things in C is to allocate less memory than necessary to hold a structure: Published May, 01, 2015

• Hybrid C/Pascal Strings

  I've been thinking for a while on how to reduce the overhead in Lwan's string buffer, when the strings are small. There are a number of ways of accomplishing this. Published November, 02, 2014

• ★ Life of a HTTP request, as seen by my toy web server

  When learning a new programming language, I tend to write two things with it: a language interpreter (usually a FORTH-like language or Brainfuck if I'm feeling lazy), and a HTTP server. Sometimes, just as a challenge or a way to quench my boredom, I do… Published October, 06, 2014

• Integer to string conversion

  There are various ways to convert integers to their string representation. These conversions are rarely a bottleneck, but they often show up while profiling certain applications. For instance, they're very common in Lwan while building the response… Published June, 23, 2014

• Implementing sequences in lwan template engine

  When I wrote about lwan's templating engine on a blog post last year, I purposedly ommitted the fact that it didn't support sequences. Took me almost a year, but I've finally implemented it this week. (Lwan is usually a low priority weekend project. Maybe… Published September, 26, 2013

• ★ Partially Applied Functions in C

  There are some functions in the standard C library that takes a function pointer to be used as a callback later on. Examples include atexit() and signal(). However, these functions can't receive an arbitrary pointer (which could hold some important… Published July, 20, 2013

• Mustache templates in C

  Generating textual output is a lot easier with templates than it is with handcrafted functions. And it is a lot easier in languages such as Python, where things like introspection are easy and cheap. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t do that in C… Published November, 11, 2012

• Vectored I/O with mmap() to serve files

  Previously, I’ve improved file serving performance in lwan by dramatially cutting down on the number of system calls performed to serve a file. However, for small files (< 16KiB), the throughput drop from the hello handler (which merely responds “Hello,… Published October, 14, 2012

• Asynchronous I/O in C with Coroutines

  Writing asynchronous I/O code in C is kind of tedious, and often leads to a callback hell. But it doesn’t have to be this way; if you have a main loop, it’s quite simple to use coroutines and write code in a soothing, old school, synchronous way. Published September, 29, 2012

• File serving with few system calls

  When I first wrote lwan, file serving was not a primary goal. I’ve added this capability later, never giving much thought to the number of system calls required to serve one file. As a result, static file serving was quite slow compared to “hello world”… Published August, 12, 2012

• Deferred statements in C

  Golang has a lot of nice features – and one I found pretty interesting is called deferred statements. This can be implemented in C++ pretty easily through RAII, but in C we’re pretty much out of luck. Or are we? Published August, 11, 2012

• String switch in C

  C’s switch statement is very powerful. However, it can’t be used with strings, only with constant integral types. This is understandable, since strings in C are merely arrays – they’re not first-class citizens. Published August, 09, 2012

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