Back in 1999 I managed a similar thing written in C with flat file storage. The whole tool chain chucked out a static binary and a directory full of templates and you just cp'ed it to the target and restarted the process.

When I look back I've got to be honest and say that it was actually a thing of beauty. The heavy lifting required for some core functions was quite bad but the whole thing pales in comparison to some of the enterprise and microservice based c# behemoths I have looked after since which require literally hours of head scratching to deliver a simple change.

I'd rather spend that time writing C than scratching my head. I'd have a lot more hair now.

you can duplicate that experience with go web dev today! :)

I have actually tried that and you're right. The whole experience made me consider going back to electrical engineering when I realised that the status quo hadn't improved in 20 years :)

Have you looked at Lua+C and LuaJIT+nginx (CloudFlare, OpenResty)? Work is underway to compile a subset of Perl6 to LuaJIT+nginx.

I can't get over the 1 based indexes in Lua, unless that has changed in recent years.

Still there :) The trade-off is rapid development (interpreted, GC), fast execution (JIT faster than Javascript) and easy interfacing to C libraries.

I shall have a try next week and see if I can cope with it :)

At about that time I knew a guy who insisted that the best web dev platform was AOLServer with application code written in C.

I worked on a startup that had an AOLServer kind of clone, it was wonderful.

However in our case only the DB drivers and Apache TCL module were written in C, everything else was pure TCL.

AOLServer + TCL was pretty slick

Yes indeed, oldies but goodies. This combo is still available and maintained, well, at least in the form of naviserver. Tcl of course has continued in active development and as useful as ever.

https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver/

http://tcl.wiki/

Those were days. https://books.google.cl/books?id=AS81GLj403kC&lpg=PA113&ots=...