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/?

Only shitty programmers worry about what language to use. Programmers who actually get shit done (like moot, Mark Zuckerburg, Jimmy Wales, etc) use PHP.

Don't worry about speed optimization when you haven't even wrote a single line of code!