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No, seriously, why? As far as I can tell, his entire argument is "web development in C is terrible and limiting, but not as quite as terrible and limiting as you might think." I guess that's good news if terrorists are forcing you to write websites in C, but I don't see even an attempt at explaining why you would choose to do this.
Come to think of it, even though we consider C to be "low level", that's really only a temporary problem that solves itself the longer you work with it and the more you build with it. It's a site different issue than the opposite issue of Ruby and PHP, which will never be able to have quite the raw performance of C.
It's a bit like the difference between fast-food and gourmet. Yes, fast-food American burgers is probably easier than fast-food... French ratatouille. When you're employees are barely passed childhood and not particularly trained in the arts, you'll bet your business on the burger (RE: the similar bubbles in the gastro-pub market vis technologicalist startup). But a practitioner at the top their game will do wonderful things with either.
I've always found it interesting that OkCupid is built with C++, although they started it before 2001. http://www.okcupid.com/about/technology
With the rise of VMs, jails, containers etc it should be much easier for general webapps to adopt this architecture.
Might anyone looking for a speedup akin to C do better to look at Go instead?
I'm not sure that using C was the craziest thing about how we did things. Nobody really had an idea how to structure a web app, so it was more or less a dozen or so CGIs which read/wrote to flat files through custom-written dbm clone (woo, NoSQL in '96!). Lots of unsophisticated string munging.
Maybe if we'd had some better abstractions, it wouldn't have been as painful, but C code written to do a lot of ad hoc string cobbling is, in fact, a little crazy.
Despite this, the product pretty much worked and actually had a few hundred customers and a future.
(We even got looked at by Yahoo, but they bought some outfit named Viaweb instead.)
So, people can't hardly write safe web apps in PHP without spraying XSS and auth bypasses and arbitrary shell executions and arbitrary SQL injections everywhere, and you also want to hand the attackers the ability to segfault your server or possibly even straight-up run arbitrary code? Anyone smart enough to truly safely code a website in C is smart enough to learn a language to create that website which doesn't get…