5h 30m 32s logged

Hi there! This is my first devlog ever, so bear with me. It’s gonna be kinda long since this is a WIP project and I want to walk you through the codebase. This first devlog covers the pre-existing code and what I did in the ~5 hours I logged.

Overview

IOMessage is a centralized messaging CLI platform built entirely in C. Server and client are both meant to be multi-platform.
The app will implement:

channels (groups where users can share messages)
moderation capabilities (kick, mute, …)
file sharing
(maybe other things in the future)

Architecture

CommunicationManager: this module handles I/O for each connected client
ServerManager: this module handles requests and allows client communication
ThreadManager / NetworkManager: modules that handles OS abstraction

Thread communication: CommunicationManager and ServerManager talk through shared queues. Each CommunicationManager pushes incoming requests to a shared request queue, ServerManager pops them, processes them, and pushes responses back to that specific client’s response queue in a consumer-producer model.

What I’m working on

Done: CommunicationManager, ThreadManager, NetworkManager.
WIP: ServerManager mainly the channel and messaging feature so i can ship a demo.

Right now I need auth and channels working. I was facing the problem of storing user data past program exit. I considered files/folders, but linking data got messy fast, example: channels need to reference actual users by id so the server can identify the allowed users, and once channels and members live in separate files with changing data, it turns into a mess.

So I choose SQLite: i choose because it stores data in just a file (minimum complexity) and as solid C API. Spent a good two hours designing the schema (it was the first time I used a DB lol).

Then the hard part: seed the DB with some info, get the server to open it, print the channels, exit and read a looooot of docs. then after I started coding, i read the documentation bit by bit and slowly became horrified… THE BOILERPLATE WAS ABSOLUTELY GRUELING: 5 function calls per query, each one can fail, so for each function there are 5 lines of code Handling the error and freeing memory. I tried wrapper functions, I really tried, but it didn’t help much.

Still need to find a way to cut the boilerplate down. I’m a bit of a perfectionist and it’s killing me. But after a lot of fighting, reading, and debugging, it finally works and displays the seeded info about channels.(the code I’m showing is basically 70% boilerplate for sqlite, btw the i swear the application can talk to clients, handle bad client behaviour and serialize the protocol, i have it turned off for testing so the app quits immediately after reading data from the database tho).