A Modern Web App in C

A commercial web product, marketyour.games, was built entirely in C and served via traditional CGI on an OpenBSD stack (C, httpd, SQLite). The build is a single statically linked binary that embeds all static assets, talks to Stripe and Postmark via libcurl, uses libsodium for crypto, and vendors small C libraries (libcjson, SQLite amalgamation). Deployments are atomic (replace the file), each request spawns a fresh process, and OpenBSD’s pledge/unveil plus httpd chrooting provide a tight sandbox. The result is a tiny supply chain (compiler plus two libraries), fast incremental builds, easy local debugging with standard C tools, and no separate database server or container orchestration.

The practical argument is that old objections to CGI no longer apply: modern kernels make forking cheap, and FastCGI remains an easy fallback. Benefits highlighted include clearer separation between web server and business logic, serverless-like invocation without vendor lock-in, minimal operational burden thanks to SQLite, and simple toolchains. The main downside is the lack of built-in web utilities, which forces hand-rolled code for cookies, form parsing, and escaping; the author suggests a small, shareable C utility header as a remedy. Overall, the stack is presented as a viable, low-complexity option for real products.