[ereslibre]

> I kind of like it because CGI is architecturally elegant, but what about performance implications? By default, the CGI is not the fastest thing on Earth.

(Wasm Labs dev here) We haven't yet measured performance in a meaningful way that we can use to compare, mainly because our PHP builds also have certain limitations mentioned in the article, such as not having OPcache available at PHP. It is however an iterative process, and we are interested in this, as well as we understand that it's interesting for the community.

> Every time a HTTP request arrives, a CGI process should be initialized over and over again wasting CPU time on BSS section / runtime library initialization. Does it work any differently when it comes to WASM?

It's a little different in Wasm, in the sense that there is no need to fork/exec (if talking about bare CGI). The PHP executable gets loaded into the runtime once (what will compile it from Wasm -> native ISA), and then for every request we create a Wasm execution context, and run the PHP Wasm module that interprets the PHP script.

Creating a Wasm execution context is certainly much lighter than a fully fledged fork/exec.