by jchw | 2025-07-09 16:03:38+00:00
> CGI and other "serverless" technologies have essentially the same benefits and drawbacks. Sometimes an AWS Lambda function has longer startup time than if you had a running process already waiting to service a web request, because it's spinning up (AFAIK) an entire VPS. So all the arguments for "serverless" are also arguments for CGI, and all the arguments against CGI are arguments against "serverless".

Honestly this isn't even the right terminology. The point of "serverless" is that you don't manage a server. You can, for example, have a "serverless" database, like Aurora Serverless or Neon; those do not follow the "CGI" model.

What you're talking about is "serverless functions". The point of that is still that you don't have to manage a server, not that your function runs once per request.

To make it even clearer, there is also Google Cloud Run, which is another "serverless" platform that runs request-oriented applications, except it actually doesn't use the function call model. Instead, it runs instances of a stateful server container on-demand.

Is "serverless functions" just a marketing term for CGI? Nope. Again, CGI is a non-overlapping term that refers to a specific technology. They have the same drawbacks as far as the programming model is considered. Serverless functions have pros and cons that CGI does not and vice versa.

> because it's spinning up (AFAIK) an entire VPS

For AWS Lambda, it is spinning up Firecracker instances. I think you could conceivably consider these to not be entire VPS instances, even though they are hardware virtualization domains.

But actually it can do things that CGI does not, since all that's prescribed is the programming model and not the execution model. For example, AWS Lambda can spin up multiple instances of your program and then freeze them right before the actual request is sent, then resume them right when the requests start flowing in. And like yeah, I suppose you could build something like that for CGI programs, or implement "serverless functions" that use CGI under the hood, but the point of "serverless" is that it abstracts the "server" away and the point of CGI is that it let you run scripts under NCSA HTTPd requests.

Because the programming language models are compatible, it would be possible to adapt a CGI program to run under AWS Lambda. However, the reverse isn't necessarily true, since AWS Lambda also supports doing things that CGI doesn't, like servicing requests other than HTTP requests.

Saying that "serverless is just a marketing term for CGI" is wrong in a number of ways, and I really don't understand this point of contention. It is a return to a simpler CGI-like programming model, but it's pretty explicitly about the fact that you don't have to manage the server...

> PHP is great as a runtime, but it sucks as a language, so I didn't want to use it. Django in regular CGI would have been fine; I just didn't realize that was an option.

I'm starting to come back around to PHP. I can't argue against that it has some profound ugliness, but they've sincerely cleaned things up a lot and made life generally better. I like what they've done with PHP 7 and PHP 8 and think that it is totally suitable for simple one-off stuff. And, package management with composer seems straight-forward enough for me.

To be completely clear, I still haven't actually started a new project in PHP in over 15 years, but my opinion has gradually shifted and I fear I may see the day where I return.

I used to love Django, because I thought it was a very productive way to write apps. There are things that Django absolutely gets right, like the built-in admin panel; it's just amazing to have for a lot of things. That said, I've fallen off with Django and Python. Python may not have as butt-ugly as a past as PHP, but it has aged poorly for me. I feel like it is an easy language to write bugs in. Whereas most people agree that TypeScript is a big improvement for JavaScript development, I think many would argue that the juice just isn't worth the squeeze with gradual typing in Python, and I'd have to agree, I just feel like the type checking and ecosystem around it in Python just makes it not worth the effort. Surprisingly, PHP actually pulled ahead here, adding type annotations with some simple run-time checking, making it much easier to catch a lot of bugs that were once very common in PHP. Django has probably moved on and improved since I was last using it, but I definitely lost some of my appreciation for it. For one thing, while it has a decent ecosystem, it feels like that ecosystem is just constantly breaking. I recall running into so many issues migrating across Django versions, and dealing with things like static files. Things that really should be simple...