It used to be the way before Java, .NET took off, only to be replaced by slow interpreted languages, because who cares, the database is the bottleneck.

Note that PHP and Perl also had enough C code, and Apache/IIS plugins, with enough C and C++ extensions.

Now all those "who cares scripting languages" are getting JIT compilers, or being rewritten into Go and Rust.

I play with c some but I just could not stand the libraries I could find to work with fast cgi, just totally opaque and I would get hung up on things like handling some socket a doohicky would hand over and I'm supposed to work with it and I could never figure it out.

Once I ditched the library idea and just coded to the spec things went much nicer lol it turned out to be a relatively normal socket coding project. Just hobby code tho.

sure. https://substrata.info/

OkCupid did it back in the day...

Yep, me. In fact, I wrote a whole netstack in C++, meaning everything from opening sockets to the web server to the tls crypto code to the sse/middleware layer of the framework. Quite literally, there is _ZERO_ externally used third-party code anywhere in the netpath. Performance is amazing, I can serve effectively ~600k full HTTPS requests per second on a single Skylake core.