People used to do that, in 90s CGI scripts were usually written in C, or even assembly. And let me tell you since I'm old enough to remember it: no, it wasn't a

People used to do that, in 90s CGI scripts were usually written in C, or even assembly. And let me tell you since I'm old enough to remember it: no, it wasn't a great experience at all. It was actually quite horrible for web developers from the today's perspective. Development was slow and painful and hard to debug as hell. Also, it wasn't secure at all, hacker usenet groups were all about stack overflows back in those days. One of my first jobs in late 90s was a complete rewrite of a huge web app into perl. It was originally written in pure C, and it had so many security and stability issues due to bad castings and stack overflows and null pointers and all that usual C stuff, that today it'd be considered completely unusable (back then corporate users were far more tolerant I guess). Perl rewrite fixed it all, no stack overflows, no worries about casting every input every freaking time, no sql injections (perl DBI used prepared statements), everything worked like a charm. And it took us only a fragment of the time it took for the original development. Programming cycle was like 10x faster since you didn't have to compile it first (just that was worth it), code was easier to read, we were much less likely to make stupid errors, etc. That's why everyone moved to perl and then php, python, ruby, etc. in the first place. They are simply better tools for the job, history has proven it already like 20 years ago.