It may not be about any language implementation inferiority, but rather a question of what they’ve optimised for. Node.js is firmly designed for daemon operati

It may not be about any language implementation inferiority, but rather a question of what they’ve optimised for. Node.js is firmly designed for daemon operation, where having a high cost of instantiating a module, something that you only do at startup, is fine, if it means you later get better throughput because you’ve done JIT compilation or whatever. (It may also just be that Node.js is unnecessarily slow at these things because no one’s cared enough. But module loading being slow is reasonably well-known in the ecosystem at large so I doubt it’s particularly that.) PHP might have lower engine startup costs because of its history of CGI usage, and lower code loading costs because of its start-from-scratch-for-each-request model—but both are probably at a later runtime cost. Perl might have lower engine startup costs because it’s tended to be in a similar basket to PHP, plus more general scripting use, where you just want to get through things quickly: faster for one-offs, slower for repeated things. And my understanding of Perl is that it’s somewhat closer to just being an interpreter (which is excellent for latency but terrible for throughput) than are the other languages we’re discussing.