I've never coded in C++, so I'm curious - what is the feedback loop like? My understanding is that since C++ is a compiled language, you can't "hit refresh" the same way you can in JavaScript/Ruby/etc.
Is that an incorrect understanding? I know C++ is supposed to be great for performance, but in truth I've never needed anything to be that fast. And if I can get the job done just as well with something I already know, I won't bother learning something like C++ which has a reputation for not being approachable.
Technically you can have some sort of command in your C++ program to make it fork itself, that is restart itself disk, maybe after freeing non-shareable resources like listening sockets. One could even imagine that this command includes self-recompilation by invoking make (or whatever your build system is).
An alternative is to have your program expose its pid somewhere, and your make file could send a signal to that pid when a new version is ready. The advantage is that if your program crashes on startup, you don't have to do something different to restart it.
If your application has to include an "auto-update" feature (like browsers), use that instead - its certainly better to eat your own dog food. Maybe just hack it a little bit so that you can force a check programmatically (e.g. by sending it a signal) and so that it connects to a local updates server.
It is true that C++ is an overly complicated language; if you don't need maximal performance, you have a lot of AoT languages that are a bit slower ( something around 0.5 C ) but more "user-friendly". In particular, if you are into servers and want fast edit-compile-run loops, Go might be a good choice.
The part of the equation you are missing is how little traffic the majority of business applications end up seeing.
A B2B app that has at most 10 concurrent requests can run on the smallest EC2 instance whether it's written in PHP or written in C++.
Bandwidth doesn't change with language choice and neither does the storage requirements of your app so those billable items don't come into the equation either.
So the CPU cost can effectively be dropped off of 95% of the apps out there today. At that point your main variable cost between C++ and something like PHP/Javascript is going to be the cost of development. All I can say to that is that it's a lot harder to find developers who can write C++ web apps at the same pace as developers slinging PHP for web apps. There is a reason Facebook uses a PHP derivative for huge portions of its web backend.
So maybe the question we should ask ourselves is: why isn’t there a smaller, cheaper EC2 instance (or any other provider than AWS) ?
This industry is tailoring the levels. Of course it’s understandable because, well, they live on it. And they count on small instances to share hardware ressources to overbook said hardware.
And I don’t blame them for that, I’m doing the same on my own bare metal servers, hosting multiple websites for clients and making money on it.
But I have the feeling that there is a lot of ressource loss somewhere in it, just for the sake of loosing it because it’s easier. Maybe I’m wrong.
I only use AWS when consulting customers prefer it.
I get a lot of mileage serving a lot of content for several domains on a free Google Cloud Platform f1 micro instance. I also prefer GCP when I need a lot of compute for a short time.
Hetzner has always been my choice when I need more compute for a month or two. For saving money for VPSs OVH and DO have also been useful but I don’t use them very often.
Go will get you 90% there in performance. I recommend that instead of C++ because it compiles fast for that edit-build-refresh cycle. Go also has the benefit of producing static binaries by default which solves a lot of the problems Docker was for.
C++ is more for the extreme control over memory. An optimized C++ server can max out the NIC even on a single core and even with some text generation/parsing along the way.
If you're a ruby user looking for extra performance, try Crystal[1]. Everything you love + types compiled to native binaries. You can set up sentry[2] to autocompile and run every time you save, so the feedback loop is just as tight.
It doesn't have to be C++ of course. The main point of OP lies in C++ being fast and easy to deploy (at least it can be). Go, Rust, to some extend C# and Java also fall in that category. This feature set becomes interesting, because it has the potential to simplify everything around it. If you don't need high fault tolerance you can go a very long way with just a single server, maybe sprinkled with some CDN caching in front if your users are international.
If you do need higher availability you can go the route StackOverflow was famous for for quite some time of having a single ReadWrite master server, a backup master to take over and a few of ReadOnly slave servers, IIRC. With such setups you can ignore all the extra complexities cloud deployments bring with them. And just because such simple setups make it possible to treat servers like pets, doesn't mean they have to be irreproducible undocumented messes.
Working in strongly statically typed languages is quite different, because the types (and the IDE/compiler) guides you. You don't have to hit refresh that often.
Even just working in TypeScript with TSed and a few basic strongly typed concepts (Rust's Result equivalent in TS, Option or Maybe, and typed http request/response, and Promise and JSON.parse) makes a big difference.
A lot less okay, just echo/print/log this object (or look up documentation eew), look at what does this look like and how to transform it into what I need. Instead you do that in the IDE.
Is that an incorrect understanding? I know C++ is supposed to be great for performance, but in truth I've never needed anything to be that fast. And if I can get the job done just as well with something I already know, I won't bother learning something like C++ which has a reputation for not being approachable.
But maybe I don't have full context?