Regarding HTTP is hard to parse - but it's not that hard. Maybe this is little known, but one of the critical pieces that allowed Node to succeed was a little http 1.1 parser I wrote painstakingly by hand (with heavy inspo from Mongrel and NGINX). I am still quite proud of it. You can see the first version here: But HTTP parsing is a solved problem now. Even if your language didn't have an HTTP parser - which is very unlikely - you could vibe it up quickly. We really don't need to re-serialize it to FastCGI.