lispcommon-lispreddithunchentoot

What webserver did Reddit use when it was originally written in Lisp?


I'm trying to read through the code of Reddit1.0 located here:

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0

But it's difficult to understand how the architecture of the website works without an understanding of how the website is served. The reddit code here does not appear to contain any type of server, thus it must have been imported somewhere else and then run, with like Hunchentoot or something. Does anyone know the answer?


Solution

  • It uses Hunchentoot, under its old name of 'TBNL'. You can see that by looking at the ASDF file, where it depends on a system named tbnl. Then if you look at the end of web.lisp you can see it set *dispatch-table* to glue itself into Hunchentoot / TBNL. I imagine it ran Hunchentoot behind some kind of front-end server.