I took a break in a new direction of web development.
Previously I had been working on this site, and the http-only site. Both of these are based on Ruby 3.4, puma, and sqlite 3. I’ve found that to be a facile, minimal, fast, and fun stack.
However, I also have an interest in minimalism through and through, including minimal energy usage. In most modern web stacks, including the one cited above, there is an incredible amount of waste.
I know, I know. With computers as fast as they are, who cares? Well, I do!
I started the project to replicate my Ruby-based sites, with templating and database access. Once I made a fair bit of progress, I pivoted to restricting the first server to static content only. The server does not support ssl - as with my Ruby sites, it will only run behind a proxy.
The result is a 60K binary with no dependencies. It serves static content on multiple hosts. It is single-threaded. Not fancy at all. A variant allows it to serve only whitelisted files.