Much as I loved Perl when I started with it back in 2000 CGI.pm was pretty hacky with new vulns popping up every week. It's creator, Lincoln Stein was, however, one of the stable of Perl Jedi and he did a sterling job of keeping it patched with the help, if I remember, of Randall Schwartz. Them were th' days. CGI::Application was an improvement and my mainstay until the arrival of PSGI and Plack which paved the way for frameworks such as Dancer and Mojolicious.