Link

Link is an experimental (as in first program I've written in Pascal) lightweight web framework written in Object Pascal. Don't expect this thing to be useful.

Philosophy

While this project is mostly for learning purposes, it is, in part, because most of my learning and exploration, thus far, has taught me that modern/complex Pascal is insanely horrendous to read. Conventions are built on top of what is an otherwise extremely argumentative language with lots of symbol/identifier collisions, inflexible namespacing (units), etc. Pascal bros, come at me!

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

-- Phil Karlton

In a field where naming is already difficult, naming in Pascal is orders of magnitude higher if you want clean, simple language, without the whole IThis and TThat. In the end, the language may get the better of me. There are lots of things I really like about the Pascal syntax, and it's been a long time since I worked in something that exposes lower level concepts.

Building and Testing

• Install Free Pascal

• Install GVM and get a reasonable version of Go (tested with 1.21.3)

• Install xcaddy and build caddy with CGI:

  xcaddy build --with github.com/aksdb/caddy-cgi/v2 --output ./bin/caddy
  

• Get wasted and contemplate why you're doing this.

• Run make.sh to compile or serve.sh to compile and serve.

• Visit http://localhost:8080 (or whatever IP if you're running in Docker/WSL2/whatever)

  NOTE: By default caddy will run over HTTP (not HTTPS) on all open IPs. See sup/caddy to chane the configuration.