It is difficult to comment without knowing more as to why you need to <i>write</i> a server, perhaps you care to give a few of the reasons. However, the way you explained it, you need low level control. How about Lua, it has a beautiful syntax, small footprint is ultrafast and interfaces very well with C (in many ways you can think of it as a Library for C). (See <a href="http://code.google.com/p/lua-web-server/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/lua-web-server/</a>). I know a lot of people consider Lua only for games but ...