GoKawiilDeveloper builds commercial web app marketyour.games using C and CGI
Corey Prophitt shipped a commercial product, marketyour.games, built with the BCHS stack: OpenBSD, C, httpd and SQLite. The app includes user accounts, a search dashboard, folder organization, Stripe payments and Postmark emails, served through CGI binaries rather than a modern framework. Deployment consists of replacing a single statically linked binary, relying on only three external libraries: libcurl, libsodium and libcjson.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The project suggests that decades-old technologies like CGI, long considered obsolete for production use, can still support a fully featured commercial web application when paired with modern OS security features like OpenBSD's pledge and unveil. It implies that simplicity and a small dependency footprint can be a viable alternative to today's heavier framework-and-container-based web stacks, at least for certain use cases. This could offer a counterpoint for developers questioning whether complex modern tooling is always necessary.
- marketyour.games runs on the BCHS stack: OpenBSD, C, httpd, and SQLite, with no framework or template engine.
- The entire app is a single statically linked binary plus a SQLite file, deployed by replacing one file with no downtime.
- Only three external libraries are used—libcurl, libsodium, and libcjson—for HTTP requests, cryptography, and JSON parsing.
Source: prophitt.me, 2026-10-12
Published there as: “A Modern Web App in C”
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