Downvote away, you know you're going to want to.
Two things.
1. Why the **** are you giving Ted Dzuiba any more credence as a tech writer than he deserves (which is none)?
(Yes, he doesn't like Node.js and he doesn't have to use it. For the rest of us, it's a tool to be used, should you wish to do so, and it carries up and down sides like everything else. For anything that's intended to service long-life connections, it's not really a bad solution. At least you can actually achieve such things in Node.js rather than trying to do it based on Apache/PHP if you have *any* plans about scalability)
2. There is a very, very good reason why we put abstraction layers like PHP or JavaScript between the raw web and the general developers. Yes, it's slower, but damn is it safer. All software has bugs, all software has points where vulnerabilities can creep in. If you sit and code at the C++ level, you're more likely to trigger them.
I'm not arguing that PHP (and JavaScript) has produced a lot of very bad code. But imagine, for a moment, that the bad PHP coders then go off and try and write C++ apps on their little servers. That, assuredly, is a disaster waiting to happen. At least there is a modicum of insulation without them having to worry about buffer overflow injections as well as all the normal gamut of vulnerability classes.