Question

What are the ups and downs of using FastCGI C++ vs. PHP/Python/Perl to do the same job.

Any performance or design pitfalls or using one over the other? Even your opinions are welcome. (Tell me why one or the other rocks, or one or the other sucks).

Answer 1

Several years ago, I more or less learned web app programming on the job. C was the main language I knew, so I wrote the (fairly large-scale) web app in C. Bad mistake. C’s string handling and memory management is tedious, and together with my lack of experience in web apps, it quickly became a hard-to-maintain project.

C++ would be significantly better, mainly because std::string is much nicer than char*.

However, now I’d use Python every time (though PHP is not a terrible choice, and perhaps easier to get started with). Python’s string handling is awesome, and it handles Unicode seamlessly. Python has much better web tools and frameworks than C++, and its regex handling and standard libraries (urllib, email, etc) work very well. And you don’t have to worry about memory management.

I’d probably only use C or C++ for a web app if I was severely RAM-constrained (like on an embedded micro) or if I worked at Google and was coding a search engine that was going to have to respond to thousands of queries per second.