yes perl is worth it. CGI is just one of many environments in which perl proves it is worth it. Perl is platform independent, however I'm not sure if there is a 16-bit build of perl anymore, probably.

Regardless you do not have 16 vs 32 problems if you are coding in pure perl, which you probably would be. You do not declare datatypes like long, int, double, etc. Nor do you have to worry about pointers.

infinite loops are almost always a case of poor design, not a bug or shortcoming of the language. These will harm your projects performace, so test, test, test. Do not deploy untested code on a production server. Set up a remote server on a localhost. Apache is a great free choice for this. failing that you may test on the command line or in certain IDE's.