The one technology that's nearly as ubiquitous on shared hosts as PHP is CGI. Plain, one-shot process-per-request CGI.
So if we want a language that can displace PHP in its niche, perhaps we should choose a language that's amenable to short-lived CGI processes. For this, I think a language that can be compiled ahead-of-time to fast-starting native code is appropriate. By fast-starting, I mean that startup should consist of little more than the kernel's exec routine.
I think the Go language would be a good fit.
So the next time you need to write a web app that should be easy to deploy on a shared host, try writing it in Go, using a web framework that supports FastCGI, which can then degrade to plain CGI. Then compile the app on a Linux box, upload it to the shared host, and thanks to the self-contained nature of executables produced by the Go toolchain, the app should be ready to go with no fuss.
So if we want a language that can displace PHP in its niche, perhaps we should choose a language that's amenable to short-lived CGI processes. For this, I think a language that can be compiled ahead-of-time to fast-starting native code is appropriate. By fast-starting, I mean that startup should consist of little more than the kernel's exec routine.
I think the Go language would be a good fit.
So the next time you need to write a web app that should be easy to deploy on a shared host, try writing it in Go, using a web framework that supports FastCGI, which can then degrade to plain CGI. Then compile the app on a Linux box, upload it to the shared host, and thanks to the self-contained nature of executables produced by the Go toolchain, the app should be ready to go with no fuss.