Comment by pjmlp
16 hours ago
> Two years ago, I picked up Zig, and I’d never have imagined I’d be considering web development in such a low-level language.
This is kind of funny remark, given that the author started in 2000 in Web development, and with PHP 3.0.
I started in 1997, our distributed systems class had exercises to write CGIs in Perl and C.
Between 1999 and 2001, most Web development at my employer was in Tcl and C, ASP was naturally a mix of VB and C++ COM components, and there was also the fun to write all those mod_something Apache extensions, and IIS ISAPI modules, naturally in C and C++.
Ah, Microsoft was also shipping ATLServer, because who wouldn't want to use ATL for Web development, while Borland/Inprise was shipping similar stuff for Delphi and C++ Builder.
PHP itself, in 3.0, it was still the time that it hardly had much functionality builtin, so it was quite common to write extension modules in C.
So it is kind of ironic to read coming back to the way things were, before the slow scripting languages takevover in the 2010's, is something no one thought about.
I interned at a Fortune 500 starting in 2000.
Most of my work was on an intranet page used for tracking internal servers, apps and databases. One of cool (at the time) features I implemented was a server-rendered ping of the servers shown on the dashboard. We're talking usually a few hundred at a time. The site ran on IIS & NT 4, written in VBS & ASP. (I think my first server was actually a dual Alpha chip, wasn't even x86, sure as hell was way before x64).
To implement the ping functionality (yes, we're talking just a straight ICMP ping), I ended up doing a COM server, written in C++, called into it from the VBS side. Eventually, .Net came out, and once .Net Framework 1.1 was released, I was able to convince my boss to let me rewrite the whole site in ASP.Net. I ditched the C++ COM object and was able to do it in C# with raw sockets (and appropriate permissions, which was a bit of a pain to get right at the time, before google and stackoverflow were around to help). Getting the C++ COM object working was actually easier because at least the MSDN library (the entire stack of CDs & DVDs it was on) had extensive documentation. The .Net side was good initially, but it just did not have the same depth as the C++ side already had at that point.
For me web was always about these scripting languages. Even in the CGI days, I learned to use Perl just enough to do a simple web form. I kind of associated the domain with GC languages, as this kind of work usually involves many temporary strings and dictionaries. In fact, the first compiled language I ever used for a web project was Go, and even that was due to the fact that it has garbage collector.
Fair enough, different life experience then.
Google probably still has a large chunk of web development happening in C++. Probably less than Java but still lots of code.