This. The one problem is a lack of a solid networking library. Unix sockets/winsock is ancient and terrible with tons of corner cases, Boost ASIO is creaky and "boosted", other useful things like 0mq are good for IPC but not Internet. Qt eats the world and is a pain to integrate. Libevent, libev etc. are not C++ and still pain to integrate.
Maybe there is some library that is lesser known but good.
As for time to develop, besides networking, C++ wins, even for hack projects, in comparison with Python even, JS/HTML/CSS w/ framework stack being far slower and making for terrible UX. (I'm not writing about languages I do not use.)
Java and C# can be fast too, but it hits the limits when you actually have to calculate things which gets real awkward real fast.
The main win is... Tooling. Java tooling is best now since maven and ant are mostly gone legacy, then C++ (I'm counting Qt Creator and Glade, cmake is eh, cmake+something is ok), then finally JS tied with Python. JS fails terribly on debugging and the creaky rarely adaptable UX libs, while Python after all these years still has tooling issues. (Plus performance where it matters.)
Rust is not there yet, maybe soon. Scala is nice though fewer people can use it than new C++.
Honorable mention to specialized tools like R, Faust, Lua, Matlab and Fortran. Note they integrate well with C and C++... Try anything else and you're in for a ride. Even second most supported, C# and Java, go through a C FFI layer.
As for time to develop, besides networking, C++ wins, even for hack projects, in comparison with Python even, JS/HTML/CSS w/ framework stack being far slower and making for terrible UX. (I'm not writing about languages I do not use.) Java and C# can be fast too, but it hits the limits when you actually have to calculate things which gets real awkward real fast. The main win is... Tooling. Java tooling is best now since maven and ant are mostly gone legacy, then C++ (I'm counting Qt Creator and Glade, cmake is eh, cmake+something is ok), then finally JS tied with Python. JS fails terribly on debugging and the creaky rarely adaptable UX libs, while Python after all these years still has tooling issues. (Plus performance where it matters.)
Rust is not there yet, maybe soon. Scala is nice though fewer people can use it than new C++.
Honorable mention to specialized tools like R, Faust, Lua, Matlab and Fortran. Note they integrate well with C and C++... Try anything else and you're in for a ride. Even second most supported, C# and Java, go through a C FFI layer.