This maybe gets to the core of why the author’s assertion is incorrect: they’re comparing a programming language to an execution environment.
Yeah, PHP can scale infinitely… if you provide it with the necessary server resources to do so. PHP is not going to scale infinitely on a Raspberry Pi.
This dynamically scaling server resource is Lambda. Hell, you can even run PHP on Lambda these days the comparison really doesn’t work.
PHP can scale to all of Facebook's front ends, and so can CGI. Because they are stateless.
Same with FastCGI. FastCGI just lets you reuse the process, so you don't have the "cold start" every time
> CGI had the original "cold start problem"
It's just that nobody has implemented a cloud that uses the CGI or FastCGI interfaces.
I quoted this same article in a blog post yesterday:
Comments on Scripting, CGI, and FastCGI - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/06/cgi.html