Some people do: it's called mod_perl. You can compile a stripped-down Apache (written in C) with mod_perl (also written in C) built in. This basically runs as a C http server that understands Perl, running the script within Apache process space. It's pretty darn close to the metal.
The interpreter is the sticky part here and something for which Perl gets some criticism in this arena, but the Perl interpreter is also written in C and is quite fast, if not small.
Bag on Perl all you like as a language, I know I do (and I use it, as well as Rails), but if you can get past the language hump mod_perl will knock you sideways. You can easily pump out a network card's worth of static content with a leftover desktop machine, and DBI is no slouch when it comes to integrating dynamic content.
Yea, mod_perl isn't the same thing as writing your application in C, but anyway, my point was in reference to the parents comment:
"I would never ever release a new version of anything that is significantly slower than the previous one. It's simply a bug in my view."
I was trying to get across that we give some up performance for convenience now and again and it's fine to do so. I worked on the BBC iPlayer API which was written on mod_perl, by the way.
