Open source · Systems software
C 4 Punk Developers is an independent open-source group building low-level infrastructure in plain C: a web framework, a deterministic runtime, and the tooling around them. Everything is public, permissively licensed, and built in the open.
What we build
Both are written in plain C, link statically, vendor their dependencies, and are designed to be read by the people who have to operate them.
C Web development Is Still Trustworthy
A web framework and application server written in plain C. It terminates modern protocols itself, embeds a database layer, and links statically into a single binary you can copy onto a machine.
Deterministic systems runtime for C
A low-level runtime focused on predictable memory behaviour, high-throughput concurrency and deterministic resource scheduling. It is what CWIST stands on, and it is usable on its own.
How we work
These are not slogans. They are the review criteria we apply to our own pull requests.
Our libraries are C17 and link statically. There is no VM to install, no interpreter to ship next to your binary, and no code generator between you and the source you are reading.
A fresh checkout builds on a fresh machine. We vendor what we depend on so that a build does not become an archaeology exercise two years from now.
Tail latency, allocation behaviour and resource ownership are designed first. An average throughput number hides exactly the failures that page somebody at three in the morning.
We publish run conditions, commit hashes and the shape of the distribution, not only the headline number. Where a competitor wins, we say so in the same table.
Code is reviewed for whether an on-call engineer can follow it at speed. Clever wins that cost legibility do not get merged.
Design discussion, issues and roadmaps happen in the open repositories. There is no private fork where the real work happens.
Start here
CWIST is a normal C library. Install it, include one header, register a route, and call listen. No code generation, no build plugin, no runtime to deploy alongside it.
#include <cwist/app.h>
static void hello(cwist_http_request *req,
cwist_http_response *res) {
(void)req;
cwist_sstring_assign(res->body, "Hello from CWIST!");
}
int main(void) {
cwist_app *app = cwist_app_create();
cwist_app_get(app, "/", hello);
cwist_app_listen(app, 8080);
cwist_app_destroy(app);
return 0;
}
Guides
Written the way we would want to be taught: every command, every file, and what to expect on screen at each step.
Install the library, serve your first route, add JSON, a database and a health endpoint, then run the binary you just produced.
Two request paths, two failure shapes. How to tell which one your workload wants, and how to read the latency distribution honestly.
Compile a CWIST server to wasm32-wasip2 and serve it under wasmtime, with the guest owning its own accept loop.
Replace per-object malloc and free with generational arenas, then add epoch reclamation for the cross-thread case.
Get involved
Issues, benchmarks, documentation fixes and hard bug reports are all equally welcome. You do not need to ask permission to start.