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Using C for CGI Programming

Issue 132

From Issue #132
April 2005

Mar 01, 2005  By Clay Dowling
 in
You can speed up complex Web tasks while retaining the simplicity of CGI. With many useful libraries available, the jump from a scripting language to C isn't as big as you might think.
Conclusions

With the right tools and a little experience, developing CGI applications with C is no more difficult than it is when using Perl or PHP. Now that I have the experience and the tools, C is my preferred language for CGI applications.

C excels when the application requires more advanced processing and long-term stability. It is not especially susceptible to failure when server changes are beyond your control, unlike PHP. Short of removing a shared library, such as libc or libmysqlclient, the C version of our application is hard to break. The speed of execution for C programs makes it a clear choice when the application requires more complex data processing.

Resources for this article: /article/8058.

Clay Dowling is the president of Lazarus Internet Development (www.lazarusid.com). In addition to programming, he enjoys brewing beer and wine. He can be reached by e-mail at clay@lazarusid.com.

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source code url broken

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 01/22/2010 - 23:00.

Thanks for you cool post. I'm trying to develop rest service by c/cgi, could you fix the broken url and make your source code and makefile available?

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