I've been known to use "fly" (a script-ish wrapper to libgd) within a shell script running as a CGI to do super quick prototyping of dynamic graphics for web pa

I've been known to use "fly" (a script-ish wrapper to libgd) within a shell script running as a CGI to do super quick prototyping of dynamic graphics for web pages. It's nothing I'd keep around for real work, though. It was just too heavy. One time, I had the problem of taking a huge data dump and reformatting it, so I wrote a shell script in the traditional way: grep, cut, and things like that. It was terribly slow. It was so slow that I managed to write, test, and run a C program which did the same thing before the shell script could finish. That's how slow it can be.