I think you don´t have to stick with C (or any another language ) for everything. Each language are good for something. Right now, for example, i´m working in a financial intelligent software analyzer. I wrote the web crawler in ruby (not rails) and now i´m planing to write the core of the system, the decision maker, at Lisp. I think a programmer should not be sticked with just one language, there´s a lot of cool things out of the C world. You dont have to write an entire C framework to build an web apps at C ... it´s just too troublesome. You have another challenges. But when it comes to process data very fast in your server, so maybe you should consider another language.