4 ms·

It's interesting that so little know what is Cgi here. It's the Common Gateway Interface and it uses environment variables to communicate to the Cgi scripts and

by gkya 10y ago

It's interesting that so little know what is Cgi here. It's the Common Gateway Interface and it uses environment variables to communicate to the Cgi scripts and thus the Cgi script can be in whatever language you wish. You don't even need a lib, reading env is enough. Its possible to write your Cgi scripts in assembly. So this process-per-request thing is not exclusively a Php thing.

Klathmon 10y ago
I know of CGI scripts (and the newer faster alternatives), I was wondering why more languages don't specifically target that kind of setup, playing to its benefits and trying to minimize the downsides.
- gkya 10y ago
  Oh, sorry. I guess it's two-fold then: a) it's not as popular and cool, and then b) not much needs to be done to target it anyways, as most often being a good unix citizen suffices, you get the input and write the output to stdout, what's in between is application realm and whatever you do is up to you.
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    No worries! I completely understand the "trendy" part. Sadly even language/frameworks need marketing, and doing things in a "wasteful" and "slower" way but simpler is gonna be a tough sell even if it might be the best move. I just feel that there is a space for a "better PHP". One that uses a better base language, but still keeps the benefits from the language like the simplicity of the "think edit reload" cycle, the shared nothing architecture that makes programs easier to write and simpler to test, and the horizontal scaling.
    - gkya 10y ago
      I've not worked on many CGI stuff (other than little things I use myself) but Python has all the housekeeping done. See this other post of mine that has an example of an interactive hello-world: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712067 . And then, Perl is used for all sorts of CGI stuff. Both have good database support. CGit [1] is a git web interface written in C. [1] https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/ https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/ P.S. An important thing that contributes to the success of PHP is the amount of hosting services that support it.

by gkya 10y ago

Klathmon 10y ago

I know of CGI scripts (and the newer faster alternatives), I was wondering why more languages don't specifically target that kind of setup, playing to its benefits and trying to minimize the downsides.

gkya 10y ago
Oh, sorry. I guess it's two-fold then: a) it's not as popular and cool, and then b) not much needs to be done to target it anyways, as most often being a good unix citizen suffices, you get the input and write the output to stdout, what's in between is application realm and whatever you do is up to you.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  No worries! I completely understand the "trendy" part. Sadly even language/frameworks need marketing, and doing things in a "wasteful" and "slower" way but simpler is gonna be a tough sell even if it might be the best move. I just feel that there is a space for a "better PHP". One that uses a better base language, but still keeps the benefits from the language like the simplicity of the "think edit reload" cycle, the shared nothing architecture that makes programs easier to write and simpler to test, and the horizontal scaling.
  - gkya 10y ago
    I've not worked on many CGI stuff (other than little things I use myself) but Python has all the housekeeping done. See this other post of mine that has an example of an interactive hello-world: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712067 . And then, Perl is used for all sorts of CGI stuff. Both have good database support. CGit [1] is a git web interface written in C. [1] https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/ https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/ P.S. An important thing that contributes to the success of PHP is the amount of hosting services that support it.