1 HN user recommended this talk1 month2021–2023score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
The author and others link it as the definitive explanation of redbean and the APE toolchain, including its performance claims.
Justine Tunney presents Redbean, a web server distributed as a single actually portable executable that runs on multiple operating systems. It embeds Lua, SQLite and MbedTLS in a fork-based server.
“If you're interested in learning more, this talk from 2021 is fascinating” (HN, 2022)
Justine Tunney's APE (actually portable executables) exploits, er, makes use of, the fact that a shebang isn't required to run a shell script. The single executable file generated by the Cosmopolitan linker creates an insane polyglot binary executable that runs on 6 operating systems as well as on bare metal (i.e. bootable as its own OS); in addition, it's a valid Zip archive, and you can modify files inside it using any zip utility... fascinating stuff. On Linux, it bootstraps execution initially as a shell script, but the shell script writes the "ELF" file header and executes it (I'm probably doing a horrible job of explaining though). [link] If you're interested in learning more, this talk from 2021 is fascinating: [this video] . It covers Redbean, a portable, run-anywhere web server built with the APE toolchain; since then Redbean 2 has been released, which adds a lot more features. Here's a link to Redbean: [link]
Data control and privacy are two of the most important things. I wrote a popular open source project where I've sought to improve that. Would you be interested in taking a quick look and offering candid feedback? See [link] and discussion thread [link] and interview [this video] and polyglot executable format [link] Someone like you could help me know if I'm doing it in the best possible way, since studying the influence of groups like cygnus was what helped me learn the hacking stunts that allowed me to pull it off in the first place.
Messages per second, latency, footprint, name it. Particularly if it's gzip encoded. See [this video] I'm working on giving redbean the fastest https serving too. Recently I've been helping to make the strongest elliptic curves go 3x faster.
redbean is a pure fork() web server and according to ab it is much faster than nginx. I feel like we've come full circle with history. Apache started off with fork() since it offers the strongest security versus other i/o models. The problem is that code bloat makes fork() go slower so as Apache ballooned over the years there was this race to the bottom in terms of i/o models, caused by tragedy of the commons. [this video]
Author links talk on a fork-based web server's speed
Author here. Thanks! The other projects I'm known for here on HN are: [link] Redbean (2011) is a single file distributable web server. Here's a video of me giving a talk about it [this video] [link] αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε (2020) lets you build c/c++/fortran/etc. code so that it runs on seven operating systems [link] Operation Rosehub (2017) where I helped save a lot of people from an Apache security bug similar to Log4j issue today I like doing these projects because they all fit together so well into a consistent story. For example, a lot of these past projects were what helped to make SectorLISP better. Thanks to APE you now have a 20kb quickly deployable and embeddable LISP interpreter. Thanks to Redbean we're going to have an online pastebin service that'll let you publish SectorLISP gists in a few days, for example: [link] Thank you Hacker News community for being so supportive and encouraging.
Like running redbean on someone else's computer? redbean embeds Lua, SQLite, and MbedTLS into a fork() driven application server that benchmarks at 1.1 million qps on a personal computer. [link] [this video]
Talk on redbean, a portable web server embedding Lua, SQLite and MbedTLS
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
6 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more
Citations, criticism and jokes
Read more