Ruby did have such a thing, via mod_passenger, and other options were available for different scripting/programming languages.
Back in the day PHP got big because most of the larger shared-hosting sites provided mod_php out of the box, along with MySQL.
If you wanted to run CGI scripts you were probably capable of doing that, whether in Perl or something else, but most of the other options came later or were unusual.
I know when I tried to setup a few sites a long long time in the past I had to get a VPS of my own, with root, to configure Apache appropriately. None of the shared hosting sites would have run the kind mods I wanted to have.
Back in the day PHP got big because most of the larger shared-hosting sites provided mod_php out of the box, along with MySQL.
If you wanted to run CGI scripts you were probably capable of doing that, whether in Perl or something else, but most of the other options came later or were unusual.
I know when I tried to setup a few sites a long long time in the past I had to get a VPS of my own, with root, to configure Apache appropriately. None of the shared hosting sites would have run the kind mods I wanted to have.