Abstracting error checking pays huge dividends, then. In PHP, if something crashes, it continues running and outputs nonsense (probably alright for the simplest

Abstracting error checking pays huge dividends, then. In PHP, if something crashes, it continues running and outputs nonsense (probably alright for the simplest of sites but you should turn this off if your thing has any kind of authentication) or it stops processing the page. PHP implicitly runs one process per request (not necessarily an OS process); everything is scoped to the request, and if the request fails it can just release every resource scoped to the request, and continue on. You could do the same in a CGI script by calling exit or abort. With any platform that handles all concurrent requests in a single process, you have to explicitly clean up a bunch of stuff, flush and close the response, and so on. There's a similar effect in transactional databases - or transactional anything. If you run into any problem, you just abort the transaction and you don't have to care about individual cleanup steps.