He does have a point about efficiency, or about delivering a single app ... but you also get those advantages with a Java, or a .NET, or even an Erlang or Haskell app which are reasonably efficient ... and still, you won't have to deal with segfaults.<p>Also, if you want extreme scalability, like being able to serve 10000 requests/sec on a single server ... sorry, but raw performance doesn't cut it ... see this article for instance ... <a href="http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html</a>.<p>Not to mention that the most usual bottleneck is the database (how many apps can you build that doesn't use one?). So even if you build the fastest web server in the world, if you're using a RDBMS you're going to end up with 100 reqs/sec, unless you're sharding or caching that data.<p>The bottom line is ... if you want extreme scalability, I don't think C++ is going to cut it, and you're going to invest a whole lot more in optimizations that are already done in more mature web frameworks.<p>Well, unless you have Google's resources and skill.