The article points out that arguably the best part of PHP is the "shared nothing lifecycle". That each request starts new, and the process dies at the end of the request. It's by far my favorite part, and I completely agree that it makes "reasoning about" (boy do I hate that phrase...) your program much easier.
Why are there no other "competitors" in this space? Why do most other languages go with the alternative route of using an event loop or daemonizing your "server" to serve up requests? I can understand why Node.js does it (otherwise the async nature would just be an annoyance for no gain), but why haven't there been any other server-side languages that not only work well like this, but actively target it?
It seems like it would be easier for everyone involved. You wouldn't need much of a GC when the process is killed every time, you don't need to worry about async IO or multi-threading or catching errors or any of the other annoyances that come with most of the traditional "event loop" way of doing things.
Why are there no other "competitors" in this space? Why do most other languages go with the alternative route of using an event loop or daemonizing your "server" to serve up requests? I can understand why Node.js does it (otherwise the async nature would just be an annoyance for no gain), but why haven't there been any other server-side languages that not only work well like this, but actively target it?
It seems like it would be easier for everyone involved. You wouldn't need much of a GC when the process is killed every time, you don't need to worry about async IO or multi-threading or catching errors or any of the other annoyances that come with most of the traditional "event loop" way of doing things.
So what's the catch?