You can also do some pretty "fun" things with PHP leveraging the opcache. I wrote what in my own personal biased benchmark was the fastest mustache template renderer by transpiling mustache to php files and then "compiling" them with apc [1]. Kind of a poor man's staging / partial evaluation optimizer.
This is still running https://goldeneaglecoin.com/ whose framework (and HTML/CSS) is pretty much untouched since 2011. It is running on an ec2 t2.medium instance and is one of the fastest e-commerce sites i know.