I keep wondering how this compares to Zig and WASM?

Zig has a nicer syntax with fewer foot guns than C. It can also compile or link with C.

Love this :)

Small, related anecdote: back in the year 2001 or so, this is in the same family of how I built websites...

The difference is I wrote in in C as Apache Modules. So, like, most people were using other people's C modules (like PHP or CGI), but once you dug deeper and you wrote your logic/site _as_ a C module, it was so much more fun (and powerful too).

I didn't have much of a templating language, so the answer to "can we change the text on this page?" was usually, "sure, just give me a few minutes to recompile the whole Apache server" :D

Fun times

Rad. Combine this with wasm on the front end and you’ve got full stack C web development.

Cool! Looks like is used dynamic loading. Which is certainly workable. One downside is that while dynamic loading is well-supported, dynamic unloading is generally not. Meaning if you are using dynamic loading and re-loading for hot updates the server process will start to accumulate memory. Not a huge issue of the server process is periodically restarted, but can potentially cause weird bugs.

You might be able to make something more robust by forking and loading the modules in a separate process. Then do something fancy with shared memory between the main process and the module processes. But I haven’t looked into this much

This hobby project is inspired by kernel modules and AWS Lambda. It lets you write raw C modules, upload them, and have the server compile and run only the module itself at runtime—no need to recompile the entire application or restart the server.

You can update routes and modules dynamically. Even WebSocket handlers can be updated without dropping existing connections.