[charliesome]

> What you need is glue code that hooks Ruby (or Python, or whatever) into the web server at the same level as PHP hooks in, the way the ancient mod_perl does for Perl.

The problem with this approach is that MRI Ruby has tonnes of global state, so unless you restart the interpreter for each request, you're going to end up with state leaking between requests.

Slash is designed so that many VMs can be quickly created in the same process without any shared global state. This way each request runs in its own isolated context and can't affect any other requests.

[mgkimsal]

>The problem with this approach is that MRI Ruby has tonnes of global state, so unless you restart the interpreter for each request, you're going to end up with state leaking between requests.

So what? That's how PHP works, and it's still pretty fast for most things. Would a mod_ruby be that much slower? Should still be faster than a CGI-style invocation.

[sitharus]

PHP only works like that because Apache's default process model is process-per-request. Anything event based requires moving PHP in to multiple fcgi worker processes, and then you get limited by that.

A fast, non-shared interpreter could work very well in a threaded server, or a threaded backend to an event-based server.