⚙️ How josef.digital Leverages C for High-Performance Messaging with ForestMQ

josef.digital is a fast-moving software agency and product studio focused on building efficient, maintainable platforms. While much of our application logic is written in high-level languages like Python and Go, we use C at the core of one of our most critical internal tools: ForestMQ.

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🌲 What is ForestMQ?

ForestMQ is a lightweight message queue written in C, designed to be ultra-fast, memory-efficient, and simple to deploy. It serves as the backbone of internal messaging at josef.digital, powering job queues, asynchronous event handling, and microservice communication.

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🧠 Why We Chose C

Using C allows us to: • Maximize Performance: With C, we get close-to-the-metal speed for handling thousands of messages per second with minimal overhead. • Minimize Dependencies: ForestMQ runs with no external runtime or virtual machine, making it ideal for containerized environments. • Build Custom Protocols: C gives us full control over binary and text-based protocol implementation, which is crucial for supporting standards like AMQP or custom formats.

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🔄 Where ForestMQ Fits In

We use ForestMQ across multiple parts of our infrastructure, including: • Email Dispatch: Our transactional email service receives messages via ForestMQ to decouple frontend interactions from backend delivery. • Uptime Monitoring: A worker service periodically checks endpoints and reports failures, all coordinated through ForestMQ. • Background Processing: Time-consuming operations such as analytics processing, scraping, and backup jobs are routed through the queue.

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📦 Benefits of Our C-Based Queue • Blazing Fast I/O: Low-level networking means fast message delivery with minimal CPU usage. • Memory Efficiency: With control over allocations and buffer reuse, ForestMQ operates well in memory-constrained environments. • Extensibility: Written in plain C, it can be compiled and embedded into other native projects or exposed via APIs.

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🔍 The Bigger Picture

While most modern systems can rely on established solutions like RabbitMQ or Redis Streams, ForestMQ gives us full ownership over performance and features. It’s not just about speed — it’s about clarity, control, and maintainability.

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📈 What’s Next

We’re expanding ForestMQ to include: • AMQP 2.0 support (in active development) • Persistent queues with disk-based durability • Enhanced observability for metrics and debugging

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✨ Conclusion

At josef.digital, using C where it counts lets us push the boundaries of what’s possible with lightweight infrastructure. ForestMQ is a key part of that — and proof that choosing the right tool, even if it’s low-level, can pay off massively when done with care.