I'm sympathetic to this view point, but a few problems:
(1) Startup time. FastCGI solves that, but it's a more complicated protocol that requires language support, unlike CGI.
(2) Language support and (web) framework support. Python's FastCGI support is kinda crappy; you'll probably see worse in other languages. Although I noticed Rust has some FastCGI bindings, so I guess people are still using it?
(3) Container support. This is probably the biggest one. All the hosting providers that I know of that support CGI or FastCGI don't give you root (for good reason), and they also don't support rootless containers (good reason 10 years ago, maybe not a good reason now)
So if shared hosting starts installing "bubblewrap" rootless containers on their machines, then we could build our own "serverless" FastCGI. But we can't really do it now.
I use FastCGI on Dreamhost, and I just tried it on NearlyFreeSpeech, and neither is quite adequate. It's funny how small a distance there is though.
I'm sympathetic to this view point, but a few problems:
(1) Startup time. FastCGI solves that, but it's a more complicated protocol that requires language support, unlike CGI.
(2) Language support and (web) framework support. Python's FastCGI support is kinda crappy; you'll probably see worse in other languages. Although I noticed Rust has some FastCGI bindings, so I guess people are still using it?
(3) Container support. This is probably the biggest one. All the hosting providers that I know of that support CGI or FastCGI don't give you root (for good reason), and they also don't support rootless containers (good reason 10 years ago, maybe not a good reason now)
So if shared hosting starts installing "bubblewrap" rootless containers on their machines, then we could build our own "serverless" FastCGI. But we can't really do it now.
I use FastCGI on Dreamhost, and I just tried it on NearlyFreeSpeech, and neither is quite adequate. It's funny how small a distance there is though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25488958
https://lobste.rs/s/9o4zsx/back_70s_with_serverless#c_9hxzjs