i wrote a vm manager in c on purpose
i could have built vmmanager in an afternoon with electron and some shell calls. instead i wrote it in c, talking to libvirt as a library and to the incus rest api over a unix socket with libcurl. it took much longer. that was the trade i wanted.
high-level frameworks are wonderful at hiding complexity — which is exactly the problem when you're trying to learn where the complexity lives. doing manual memory management around gtk widgets, parsing json-glib responses, handling a socket that can just stop talking to you: that's where i actually learned how virtualization management works under the calm proxmox dashboard.
not every project should be built the hard way. but some should, on purpose, while you still have the time to.
written by dharun ashokkumar · more reflections