Its verbosity. I'll wager that it'll be a long time before a C++ web developer will be able to write faster code than an equally competent Python, Ruby, Haskell, or Clojure web developer.
And how do you account for PHP? Oodles of documentation, fast iteration, and swaths of libraries out of the box seem to have trumped basically every other concern, including its absurd verbosity.
Backend languages don't and shouldn't matter, especially when most webdev backend is no more sophisticated than your average CLI and you're probably going to end up spending most of your time dicking with CSS and HTML anyway. You could probably count equivalent productivity lost in tens of thousands of lines of C++, just scanning the dizzying array of loonybin.js frameworks for frontend work.
I'd gleefully do any backend job in C++ if it meant someone else handing me the database schema and the frontend ready to go.
It is?
> What is it that really holds C++ back from being a solid choice for web frameworks?
Language wise? Not much. It's more of a library and culture "problem". There's no inherent reason why C++ can't be used for web frameworks.
But that'll never happen.
srv.applications_pool().mount(cppcms::applications_factory<WebSite>());
Not doing us any favours there, at all. C++ is crying out for a bit of 'hip' and there's really no reason, with C++11 now pretty ubiquitous, we can't have some Sinatra-inspired frameworks.
What is it that really holds C++ back from being a solid choice for web frameworks?