Even with things like Python, CGI is pretty fast these days. If your CGI script takes a generous 400 milliseconds of CPU to start up and your server has 64 cores, you can serve 160 requests per second, which is 14 million hits per day per server. That's a high-traffic site.
That is, if your web service struggles to handle single-digit millions of requests per day, not counting static "assets", CGI process startup is not the bottleneck.
A few years ago I would have said, "and of course it's boring technology that's been supported in the Python standard library forever," but apparently the remaining Python maintainers are the ones who think that code stability and backwards compatibility with boring technology are actively harmful things, so they've been removing modules from the standard library if they are too boring and stable. I swear I am not making this up. The cgi module is removed in 3.13.
I'm still in the habit of using Python for prototyping, since I've been using it daily for most of the past 25 years, but now I regret that. I'm kind of torn between JS and Lua.
That is, if your web service struggles to handle single-digit millions of requests per day, not counting static "assets", CGI process startup is not the bottleneck.
A few years ago I would have said, "and of course it's boring technology that's been supported in the Python standard library forever," but apparently the remaining Python maintainers are the ones who think that code stability and backwards compatibility with boring technology are actively harmful things, so they've been removing modules from the standard library if they are too boring and stable. I swear I am not making this up. The cgi module is removed in 3.13.
I'm still in the habit of using Python for prototyping, since I've been using it daily for most of the past 25 years, but now I regret that. I'm kind of torn between JS and Lua.