Greetings:

Sadly, I am that nerdy...

I suggest you take a look at FastCGI. You can do some really cool things with it, and it's a lot more extensible than a simple I/O library. It's fast as lighting too, and puts the standard APIs to shame. It installs as a module to the webserver, then you can write apps for it in C/C++, Perl, Tcl, and Java. How sexy is that?:

http://www.fastcgi.com/

Have Fun!