Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin

While all you say is true, it bears note that it didn't need to be decisive. The current mob branch of tcc is such that a `#!/bin/tcc -run` "script" is about 1.3x faster than perl</dev/null on two CPUs I tried.

Besides your two slower examples, Julia and Java VMs and else thread PHP also have really big start up times. As I said up top, people just get addicted to "big environments". Lisp culture would do that with images and this is part of where the "emacs is bloated" meme came from.

Anyway, at the time getline wasn't even standardized (that was 2008 POSIX - and still not in Windows; facepalm emoji), but you could write a pretty slick little library for CGI in a few hundred..few thou' lines of C. Someone surely even did.

But things go by "reputation" and people learn what their friends tell them to, by and large. So, CGI was absolutely the thing that made the mid to late 90s "Perl's moment".

CGI is not anymore a major use case for Perl. The modern Perl web apps are built on PSGI and production deployment is as a long lived Perl process.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Perl startup time has drifted. Need benchmark.