Proposal: Compressing DevDocs with a Low-Level C Core

[CyberReaper00]

I’ve been using DevDocs for years—it’s a lifesaver when AI fails on niche cases. I have a lot of respect for the work done so far, but the current Ruby/JS stack feels like it’s holding the project back from being as fast and straight-forward as it could be

What i am asking is if I can rewrite the core server and processing logic in C? Specifically:

1. The Search Engine: Moving the indexing and fuzzy matching from JS to a C codebase that is compiled to a wasm module to kill the memory lag

2. The HTML Pipeline: Replacing the Ruby/Nokogiri filters with a fast C-based parser for cleaning docsets

3. The Local Server: Swapping the Ruby/Sinatra backend for a lightweight C static server to remove the heavy runtime requirements for local hosting

I'm happy to handle the heavy lifting and resolve any issues that pop up with this new setup. Are you guys open to adding this C-based paradigm to the official repo? I truly believe this would make the project much leaner and easier to maintain long-term

I truly hope that you will accept this crazy request to rebuild the core of the project in a language that most of your contributors probably dont use and I hope I get the chance to work with you on this

[tsengia]

I've had similar thoughts.

However I disagree with your choice of C.

Something like Go or Rust would be more maintainable, while still giving the same benefits as C (smaller binary size, less dependencies, faster execution, quicker to develop).

I do believe that some of the scraping logic can stay/should stay in Ruby, but I would be happy to see it also ported to Go/Rust or even Python/Node.

[CyberReaper00]

Something like Go or Rust would be more maintainable, while still giving the same benefits as C (smaller binary size, less dependencies, faster execution, quicker to develop).

I dont know who hit you in the head and said rust is a maintainable language, but i can see the case for go, but even so the zero-overhead perks of C are unbeatable so i would still prefer to work in a proper language like that

But even so, if the maintainers of devdocs want a more modern language, using D wouldnt be too bad, its still not as good as C but its decent enough