AmigaE for PC

Some old computers are like cult cars - they have souls. Those computers were designed with passion by the greatest visionaries of their times, like Jay Miner or Steve Wozniak. Although Apple is the only brand which has successfully resisted the Wintel domination on the personal computer market (partly by adopting x86 architecture) there are still many devoted fans of other architectures, who not only cherish the memory of their favourite computers by writing new software and organising demoparties, but also by building entirely new machines. Amiga community stands out strongly in this area: you can buy not only hardware like AmigaOne (Sam440 / Sam460) or Natami, but also a new version of AmigaOS called AmigaOS 4. PC users can download AROS, which is an operating system designed to be as compatible as possible with original AmigaOS. I used it for a while on Acer Aspire One Z95 and was very impressed - it was not only blazing fast (booting in less than 8 seconds), but also allowed me to connect to a WiFi network and browse web sites.

The most popular programming languages for Amiga (except assembly and C) were Amos and AmigaE. Amos inspired some PC game programming systems like PlayBasic, DarkBASIC or sdlBasic, but AmigaE successors were for many years available only for MC680x0 CPUs. Now you can get PortablE, which is an improved recreation of AmigaE, and use it to write AmigaE programs on Windows. The only requirement is that you need MinGW installed (I use easy to install TDM-GCC bundle) and cannot use some multimedia libraries, which have not been ported to x86 architecture. However, all shell examples compile and run smoothly, so if you are an Amiga fan (like me) and want to have some fun, you can go back for a moment to writing software in AmigaE again.

Mongoose - small embeddable web server

David Bolton is a software developer and blogger I respect very much not only for his programming skills, but also for his willingness to share his knowledge with others. He runs the best blog dedicated to programming in all falvours of C (ANSI C / C++ / C#) I have seen so far. You can find there a lot of tips, tutorials, quizes and sometimes description of interesting and yet less known software.

Recently David mentioned an interesting project called Mongoose, a small cross-platform webserver written in C. On the contrary to another beforementioned C-based web server G-WAN, which is not embeddable, closed source, and supports only Linux (Windows version can be downloaded, but is not supported), Mongoose is fully embeddable, open source and runs on Linux, Windows, MacOS X and Android. Currently Mongoose provides bindings to Python and C# as well as support for CGI scripts (including PHP), and as addition to this it can be easily embedded into your C/C++ application. Of course, if you want to retain flexibility and run C servlets along with other scripts, you can still use Tiny C Compiler through CGI. Mongoose requires no installation and can be run with one click (on Windows) or command (on Linux), so it can be used for example to easily share some files on the local network via web interface.

By the way, there is another popular project with the same name. It is a Node.js library for MongoDB.