In fact you can create a "daemonized" webserver in PHP and handle each request in a special handler function. For async case there is ReactPHP (http://reactphp.

In fact you can create a "daemonized" webserver in PHP and handle each request in a special handler function. For async case there is ReactPHP (http://reactphp.org/ http://reactphp.org/), don't know any product for sync case, but creating one is certainly possible. And you can also set up Ruby, Python, Rust, Haskell, Java, etc to create a new interpreter/vm/whatever for every request. All of those languages have libraries to support CGI. Using the same OS process but restarting the interpreter/vm will be a bit more complex, but absolutely possible. You can even implement the "every file is an entry point" approach for at least Python and Ruby. The difference is what is the intended use for each platform. E.g. creating a new OS process, loading the PHP interpreter, bootstrapping Wordpress, getting some data from the DB and rendering a page is possible under 600ms while creating a new OS process, loading the CPython, bootstrapping Django, getting some data from the DB and rendering a page will easily take you 4 seconds. This is because Django developers didn't expect you'll be doing that, so they put a lot of stuff in the initialization step (system checks, creating db connections, setting up logging, ...).