I was having a look at a few different web servers this morning when I came across G-WAN. As I understand, its a web server written in C and you have to make use of it by writing your websites/webapps in C. One clear benefit is speed as the G-WAN site suggests.
However, on the forums, the creator of G-WAN asked why not use C for web based apps and I can not think of a single reason apart from it being difficult (for me anyway, I am newbie when it comes to C). There must be more reasons why we all use PHP, Python, Ruby etc apart from it being easy to develop in these languages. I don’t see that as a good reason.
So I put it to you: Why do you not use C for your web apps?
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Answer
It takes a great deal of care to get a C program correct and secure. That care means that you need to have really good people writing your programs. That means you pay more.
Also, C doesn’t have the benefit of drawing from an enormous single standard library of functionality as .NET (and the other major web-centric platforms) has. So you may have to either buy components, or perform interop, or roll your own functionality which comes “for free” with a more, shall we say “web-centric” language like PHP or C# or Ruby or whatever. That means you pay more.
Add all of that to the fact that single-threaded computational speed just isn’t that important on the web. If you need more scalability, most organizations can economically just throw more cores at the problem and be fine. This is not true for everyone, of course. I’d imagine that the core of Google’s engine is written in C or a similar language not only for speed, but to save real money in power costs.