Can use rust, go, or whatever compiled language you want and it'll probably be much more performant starting up than any interpreted language.

One additional bit of context is the person you’re replying to, simonw, is also the creator of Django, which at the time was the world’s defacto standard Python web framework, and was created at a time (2005) that long predates either Go (2009) or Rust (2012).

We didn't have so many options in the 90s!