++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+ The Urbe Project: back to C
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
| Although I criticize the Web a lot, I must confess we aren't going to get rid
| of it in the near future. And, it's important to say, THERE ARE a lot of things
| there that actually are kind of cool...
| 
| 
| Now, I started a Youtube channel some days ago. It's named "til cleber", that,
| in Portuguese, means "tilde cleber": a reference to "~cleber". (It also contains
| a pun, because the name sounds just like "uncle cleber", too). And I'm talking,
| guess what?, about how the Web missed the target about The Unix Philosophy and
| some ways we could have done better.
|
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTVu-cjuBp1cbAMvMd5UuVw
| (I speak in Portuguese in the videos and there are no English subtitles...)
|
|
| In the next video I'm going to introduce my ideas about an alternative protocol
| I'm working, named "Urbe". That's Latin for "city" or "town" (and the root for
| the word "urban", for instance). Its components obey the following scheme I'm
| going to draw while my dog sleeps under my desk with its head laying over my
| right foot...


URBE:

  +-------------+
  | Vila        |
  |             |
  | [Locus]-~~~~~~~~~- Via -~~~~~~~-[Hospes]
  | [Locus]     |
  | [Locus]     |
  |             |
  +-------------+

| I purposedly avoided common nomenclature, because I want people implementing it
| to dissociate this scheme from the Web. But, if don't know any Latin, here
| comes some legends relating both protocols/environments/technologies:


 Urbe    --   Web
 Vila    --   Server
 Locus   --   Site
 Via     --   HTTP
 Hospes  --   Client/Browser


| That is enough details for now. The thing is: it must follow the Unix
| Philosophy, so we're not going to have A Big Server Implementation
| communicating with A Big Browser Implementation. It MUST be composed of small
| applications, preferably pre-existing ones.
|
|
| So, starting with the Vila (the "Server"), the first thing to implement is a
| connection handler. It must `accept` a lot of simultaneous connections and call
| proper programs to handle each one. I even thought about using `netcat` (`nc`),
| but it is not built as a multi-connection manager.
| In the end, having not found a nice alternative, I'm writing my own connection
| handler from scratch. In C.
| 
|
| Fact is, I know C. I knew it very well less than 10 year ago, but I'm using
| basically only higher level languages, like Python and shell scripts, for such
| a long time, that I kind of lost the hand in writing C programs, even a simple
| one like that.
| 
|
| Interestingly, I'm trying to grasp this skill back NOT USING THE WEB. So I'm
| guiding myself, when possible, only with man pages (mostly level 2). I'm still
| stuck on Linux (I confess I'm not smart enough to learn too much new stuff at
| the same time, so I'm delaying my plans of learning OpenBSD and Jehanne OS for
| my own mental sanity sake), and now I can see some man pages are kind of very
| wanting.
| 
|
| I tried to implement the triple `socket`, `bind`, `accept` only reading man
| pages, but the trick about opening an AF_INET stream socket (the very common
| TCP/IP connection) was impossible to get from them. I had to appeal to the Web
| to discover `accept` had two NULL arguments...
| 
|
| I believe C is one of the languages that separate The True Programmer from the
| most common "programming language user". Hell, C is THE language The True
| Programmer must master at all. BUT, i must confess: it's not a "sane" option
| for most of the needs people have nowadays. I'm happy to see a lot of progress
| on Rust (that I believe is becoming the natural C successor for "system
| programming") and Go (that I believe is becoming the natural C successor for
| "apps programming"). I'm very, very interested in implementing something using
| both of them.
| 
|
| I'm kind of planning on trying Nim, too, although I have some bad feelings
| about it after reading the "usage" documentation on the language website: it
| feels very, how could I say? "Windows-ish" or something like that. And the
| compile-to-Javascript thing doesn't help that much, either...