sozluk-cgi VS FuckIt.py

Using CGI protocol on a Windows server. IIS (Windows' own web server) basically interfaces with executables by running them, feeding them HTTP headers, and server variables through environment variables, and gets the response HTTP headers and the body from their STDOUT. It's very inefficient, of course, since every request requires spawning a new copy of the executable, but it had worked fine in its first months :)

Here is a very simple example from the original sources: https://github.com/ssg/sozluk-cgi/blob/master/hede.pas

I wrote Eksi Sozluk, the most popular Turkish social platform to date, back in 1999 using Delphi as CGI executables[1]. Delphi was the tool that I knew best, and CGI worked for me at the beginning. I almost immediately started having problems with EXE files constantly active, making updates impossible (as it was Windows based), which required restarting the server for any kind of update.

CGI executables also caused problems when I switched to an Alpha AXP RISC server which emulated x86, bringing the performance to a crawl. That made me switch to classic ASP, and about 10 years later, to ASP.NET MVC with routing, unit tests, abstractions, jQuery, all the shiny things at the time.

Web didn't stop there of course; there came SPA's, React, Vue and whatnot.

Now, seeing the yearning for CGI in 2023 feels funny. Have we come full circle? :)

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[1] https://github.com/ssg/sozluk-cgi

Traditionally, you import a package and then use things from it to do a task. However, it is actually possible to have the import itself do stuff; I used this technique in python_ms to replicate the original JS module down to its import. And fuckit did it way before that.

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Someone already made it for you: https://github.com/ajalt/fuckitpy