I wrote a particular Perl daemon the other day with Whitaker... busted it out in about an hour, if even. It consumed 100% CPU. Suck.
Tuned the Perl... 60-80% CPU. Way too much.
This evening wrote it in C, it took about 3 hours to write .... 10% CPU, with debugging, assertions, no tuning, no -O flags.
Cool, but sad.