imageboard

I want to write a good imageboard engine with clean code, to be the preferred choice instead of 4chan's shitty codebase (admit it, it's true) and derivatives. What I am having trouble with, is what language/environment to do it in. Every one has ups and downs. Here are some I can program in:

* C with CGI is very fast (except for fork overheads), but development times are going to be absolute shit.
* C with FastCGI runs even faster than CGI, but the development times are the same as above, and I don't like the added complexity compared to plain old CGI.
* Python is just shit. Period.
* node.js is a cool concept, but I am worried about performance/scalability, as well as the fact that it doesn't seem like a solid platform to bank on; I always feel that in ten years, no one will care about it, and my imageboard will be dead.

There are other options, like perl, but I don't know them yet, so learning overhead must be taken into account.

What should I do, /prog/?

>>15
They're cached in several layers, raw PHP is x100 slower than JavaScript.
It takes ungodly amount of cludges to make PHP fast,secure and "scalable":
 The once-generated PHP content (a single puny HTML page) doesn't scale when everyone(>5k concurrent) reloads the same page like on 300mget and the php Script has to regen new content.
Compared to C servers which have them the functionality in native code(compiled modules), such stuff takes nanoseconds to generate.