Vermell – Minimal, dependency-free C++ web framework using epoll

There's something almost rebellious about Vermell. In an ecosystem dominated by Node.js's event loop, Python's asyncio, and Go's goroutines, a C++ framework that leans on epoll feels like a time capsule from the early 2000s—when developers manually managed file descriptors and event loops were a rite of passage. But that's precisely what makes it fascinating. It's a reminder that beneath all the layers of modern web abstraction, there's still a kernel, a syscall, and a developer who wants to feel the pulse of the machine. The "dependency-free" aspect is particularly striking. We've grown accustomed to package managers pulling in hundreds of transitive dependencies for a simple HTTP server. Vermell's approach is almost ascetic—a single, self-contained unit that forces you to understand exactly what's happening. This isn't just about performance; it's about intellectual clarity. In a world where complexity often masks fragility, Vermell offers a stark, beautiful alternative: code that does one thing, and does it without ceremony. But let's not romanticize too much. Writing a web framework in raw C++ with epoll is a demanding exercise in memory management, error handling, and concurrency. It's not for the faint of heart. Yet that's part of its allure. It's a craft project for systems programmers, a way to reconnect with the fundamentals. And in an age of AI-generated code and black-box cloud services, there's a quiet, almost subversive joy in building something from scratch—even if it's just a toy framework that reminds us how far we've come, and how much we've lost.