In every software project, there is a certain amount of pain to be experienced. Some of it by the developers, some of it by the users. If the developers feel more of it, the users feel less …

For example: write your web application as a CGI in C++. It runs fast and installs easily (without root perms if you have AllowOverride All, without restarting daemons). But the pain level of development is pretty high.

A related observation: CGI apps don’t necessarily have to be slow. What makes them slow is the overhead of an interpreter starting up, compiling a script, and shutting down. Write them in compiled languages and they scream along. For example, my Apache here does 200 hits/second on a straight HTML file, and 170 hits/second on a C++ CGI.