A Modern Web App in C
A software developer shares their experience building a modern, functional web application using the C programming language and CGI. The project demonstrates that traditional, low-level tools can still be efficient and secure for modern web development.
Why it matters
It challenges the industry-standard reliance on heavy frameworks and JavaScript-heavy stacks by proving that minimalist, high-performance alternatives remain viable.
# Corey Prophitt » A modern web app in c ## INTRO If you wanted a dynamic website in 1994, you wrote a C program, dropped it in a cgi-bin directory, and let Apache fork it per request. Thirty-two years later, I shipped a commercial web product using fundamentally the same technology.
Everything about marketyour.games is modern. It's a web product with user accounts, a search dashboard for content creators, folders for organizing them, payments via Stripe and transactional emails via Postmark. It follows progressive enhancement and doesn't require any JavaScript.
Everything is modern except the way it was made and how it is served. Here are my thoughts on writing a real product in C and serving it via CGI in 2026.
CGI's decline was justified in 2004 but doesn't hold up in 2026.
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