[cullenking]

With most modern languages having the easy capability of writing an extension in C, this is poor advice. You can 100% quickly mock up whatever in ruby, python etc, and when you need to, write a module in C that is plug and play. I have done this several times for calculating metrics on geodata. I wrote a ruby class to do the work, used it in production until we got a good enough amount of users (load), then rewrote it in C. My main code wasn't even touched since I had already abstracted the calculations into their own class. All this requires is you think ahead and pull out any heavy-lifting code into its own class, and you can just swap that out down the road.