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Developer Corey Prophitt says he built and shipped marketyour.games, a commercial web product, in C and serves it through CGI on OpenBSD. The account describes a compact stack using SQLite and a few libraries, but it is one developer’s report, not an independent performance or security evaluation.
Developer Corey Prophitt says he has shipped marketyour.games, a commercial web product built in C and served through the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) on OpenBSD. His report describes a deliberately small stack—with SQLite, a handful of libraries and no JavaScript requirement—offering a concrete example of an older web-server model being used for a current product.
Prophitt describes marketyour.games as a service with user accounts, a search dashboard for content creators and folders, plus payments through Stripe and transactional email through Postmark. He says the application follows progressive enhancement and does not require JavaScript. The report does not provide user counts, revenue figures, uptime data or independent verification of those product details.
The stack, which Prophitt calls BCHS, consists of OpenBSD, C, httpd and SQLite. There is no application framework or separate database server in his description: a C program reads CGI environment variables, handles requests and writes HTML, while SQLite stores application data. He says the application is built as a statically linked binary and deployed by replacing the existing file; each request starts a new process.
For external services and supporting tasks, Prophitt lists libcurl, libsodium and libcjson. He says libcurl handles requests to Stripe and Postmark, libsodium supports random identifiers, password hashing and Stripe webhook verification, and libcjson parses JSON. He also says the application’s static assets are compiled into the executable and served from memory, with traffic routed through httpd to the CGI program.
A Small Stack for a Commercial Service
The report matters as a practical account of a less-common choice for contemporary web development. CGI remains a defined way for a web server to run an external program for a request, but many current applications use long-running application servers, frameworks and larger dependency ecosystems. Prophitt’s project shows that a developer can assemble familiar web functions—accounts, search, payments and email integrations—without adopting that typical arrangement.
The reported design may appeal to developers who value compact deployments and explicit components. A single application binary and a SQLite file can make the deployment footprint easier to inspect than a system involving multiple services. But simplicity of deployment does not, on its own, establish better reliability, security or operating costs. Those outcomes depend on implementation, maintenance and production conditions that the report does not quantify.
Using C also changes the engineering trade-offs. It gives the developer direct control over memory and low-level behavior, while placing responsibility for safe handling of input, errors and resources on the application. Prophitt frames OpenBSD’s sandboxing tools as part of his security approach; that is a description of his setup, not an independent audit of the product.
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CGI Returns in a Different Setting
CGI is an older interface between web servers and programs. In the model Prophitt describes, httpd supplies request details through environment variables and standard input, then collects the program’s response. Unlike a conventional long-running application server, the CGI program runs separately for each request. That design is simple to reason about, but it also means process startup and per-request resource use are considerations for the application’s workload.
Prophitt contrasts this with a common arrangement in which a web server forwards requests to an application server that runs business logic. He argues that CGI gives his project a clearer division of responsibility and makes the application easy to run from a shell for debugging. These are his assessments based on building the service; the article supplies no comparative benchmarks against other architectures.
He also says OpenBSD’s httpd serves the CGI program in a chroot and points to pledge and unveil as tools that can restrict what a C program may access. The source presents these as features of his environment, rather than evidence that the deployed application has passed a security review. His description of a small dependency set likewise refers to the components he identifies, not a full third-party inventory or supply-chain audit.
“You can write a modern web application in C. I shipped one.”
— Corey Prophitt, in his report
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Performance and Security Evidence
The report does not state how many people use the service, how it performs under peak traffic, or what its hosting and operating costs are. It also does not supply uptime records, load tests, a security audit, incident history or a comparison with a framework-based implementation. The reported build times lack hardware and methodology details.
Prophitt’s account is the source for the product’s features and architecture. The supplied material does not include comments from customers, independent reviewers, OpenBSD maintainers or security specialists. It is also unclear how the service handles traffic beyond the author’s described per-request CGI model, or what scaling changes might be needed as demand grows.
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Further Evidence From Production
The source describes an already-shipped product, but does not announce a new release, a planned technical milestone or a future performance test. The next useful evidence would be operational detail over time: usage, reliability, security review and behavior under load. Until such information is available, the report is best read as a developer’s account of one working implementation, rather than proof that CGI or C is suitable for every modern web service.
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Key Questions
What is marketyour.games?
Prophitt describes it as a commercial web product with user accounts, a search dashboard for content creators and folders. His report also says it uses Stripe for payments and Postmark for transactional email.
What technologies does the app use?
The reported stack is OpenBSD, C, httpd and SQLite, with libcurl, libsodium and libcjson for integrations and supporting functions. The application is served through CGI, and Prophitt says its static assets are included in the executable.
Does the site require JavaScript?
Prophitt says the product follows progressive enhancement and does not require JavaScript. The supplied report does not include an independent test of the site’s behavior.
Does the report prove that C and CGI are better than modern frameworks?
No. It documents one developer’s implementation and experience. It does not provide comparative benchmarks, independent security findings, user metrics or a cost analysis.
Source: hn
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