Ethereal Wake

In the modern world, people tend to use massive frameworks to accomplish simple tasks. Nothing quite like swatting a fly with a nuclear missile when you load up 100 megs of runtime just to execute ping and post the result to a database. But sometimes, when you’re writing a utility, you want it to be quick and lightweight. And if you’re going through the effort, you might as well see about making it portable.

Inline functions are a notable feature of both C and C++. By exposing the source file to the implementation of a function, they allow a variety of optimization techniques that wouldn’t be possible if it had to call out to a subroutine in a different file (at least without link-time optimization).

However, despite the common syntax, the C and C++ languages implement them in very different ways. While C++ takes a “user friendly” approach and automatically manages the manipulation of multiple implementations, C requires a more manual approach. As a result, inline functions are less common in C and mixed language code, generally using the nuclear option of declaring them static.

On my home server, I use FreeBSD. While FreeBSD beat Linux to the containers by nearly a decade (comparing jails to cgroups), I have to acknowledge that cgroups are the superior design. Whereas jails are a bunch of hacks piled on top of chroot, cgroups are a much cleaner abstraction of the kernel’s namespaces. But even beyond the elegance of the design, software like Docker makes it much easier to run your tools in containers, even if the offloading of sysadmin responsibilities it encourages triggers my OCD.

Recently, I needed to hack together a quick server-side application for a test page. When it comes to quick and dirty, most people turn to Python. While Python is hardly my favorite language, it is certainly suited for the task.

One of my requirements was that I wanted to minimize the number of dependencies. Installing Python is bad enough (my nginx container is extremely bare bones), but installing a massive framework for what was effectively a wrapper around a system command would make things even worse. So I decided to make due with wsgiref.simple_server that ships with CPython.

On my home server, I use FreeBSD. Sadly, the BSD’s have been falling behind Linux in the past decade but they still appeal to many people and even have a few tricks left in them. Most notably, as Linux has been struggling with next generation file systems for a few years now, FreeBSD has integrated ZFS for over a decade.

While modern Linux distros become ever-more complex interplays of components, the BSD’s have remained relatively simple. Custom installation (by hand or script) is trivial when the system is distributed as a tarball or two versus a constellation of packages numbering in the thousands. Just boot into the live CD, format the file systems, unpack the tarballs, install the boot loader, and reboot into your new system.