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A look at modern PHP

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Re: A look at modern PHP

#231

Post by solraph »

72deluxe wrote: post #85
solraph wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, I feel the same way. After much thought this weekend, I concluded that it was time to move on from PHP. I decided against the any other scripted language (Ruby, Python), as it felt like more of the same. Requirements were strict typing, functional programming support, built-in concurrency, decent library support, and real support for both native and Javascript. It pretty much came down to Kotlin or Rust. I real…

Why not C++ in this area? The more I use PHP the more I appreciate C++'s type system.

No garbage collection, doesn't compile to Javascript[0] and everything on Android is moving to Kotlin anyway.

Just to be clear, my reasons stated above is why I'm moving to Kotlin. I make no claim that other people should or would want the same things. I've realised that I like languages with explicit strict typing, and that allow for a greater level of expressiveness at the cost of a higher intrinsic complexity and the comprehension that requires.

[0] https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/js-overview.html

Re: A look at modern PHP

#232

Post by AegirLeet »

echelon wrote: post #214
AegirLeet wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is absolutely not the case, and you know it. Almost every language has a wealth of HTTP tools and frameworks, and many of them come built-in. Lots of languages have HTTP tools and frameworks, but not many of them are even comparable in scope to Symfony or Laravel. Out of curiosity, can anyone point me at some frameworks in other languages that have the following things built-in? * Route matching and dispatch *…

Ruby on Rails. Django. Revel. Actix.

RoR and Django are probably the closest (Laravel was inspired by RoR). Still, I don't think they support all those features.

Like I can't find any official RoR support for payments, full text search, encryption, pagination, scheduled tasks or building CLI commands.

With Django, full text search seems limited. It supports PostgreSQL, but I couldn't find first-party integration for Algolia, Solr, Elasticsearch etc. or a generic way to add backends (pluggable drivers) for them. There's support for WebSockets through Django Channels, but it seems a lot more basic than Laravel's broadcasting system. No official support for queued jobs or schedules?

Revel doesn't seem to have support for building CLI commands, encryption, emails, pagination etc. Apparently, any kind of database access or ORM isn't even first-party?

The inclusion of Actix in this list confuses me. From what I understand, Actix isn't a web framework at all, it's more like a foundation for using the actor model.

(I didn't exhaustively analyze everything, there's certainly more things missing from some of those frameworks)

Re: A look at modern PHP

#233

Post by asdkjh345fd »

fredsted wrote: post #145

I wonder if most developers that trash on PHP for trivial issues like seen in this thread haven't been using it for many years, or had a bad experience (e.g. maintaining a legacy app). Some developers live in a kind of technical vacuum where, I guess they assume, the technical features of their programming language are what makes the difference in the value of the business they're building. In reality, the difference…

Some people simply have reasonable standards. I tried for years to hire a PHP dev. I never found a single one. I found tons of people who had PHP on their resume, and not a single one of them was anything close to competent. PHP only makes hiring easy if you don't care about the quality of work that gets done. I can hire a million PHP monkeys, but everyone who has the right combination of intelligence and conscientiousness to be a competent software developer moves on from PHP after 2 or 3 years as they discover what it is.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#234

Post by alphadevx »

missosoup wrote: post #224
alphadevx wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you can't query your DB, you hit your resident memory cache. Redis, Memcached, etc. You would query those first surely, before loading the DB? Regardless, I've been using Redis and Memcache for years from PHP, so mute point. > I use multiple threads in a single request flow frequently. So how do you track those? And for how long do they live after the parent request has been processed, or do they block the par…

Just FYI since you've done it twice and might want to know, it's not mute point. It's moot point.

LOL thank you, English is hard (like engineering) ;-)

Re: A look at modern PHP

#235

Post by AegirLeet »

onli wrote: post #220
AegirLeet wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is absolutely not the case, and you know it. Almost every language has a wealth of HTTP tools and frameworks, and many of them come built-in. Lots of languages have HTTP tools and frameworks, but not many of them are even comparable in scope to Symfony or Laravel. Out of curiosity, can anyone point me at some frameworks in other languages that have the following things built-in? * Route matching and dispatch *…

Rails should match that, if you accept that a small part of the feature list is provided by (popular and commonly used) plugins.

Yes, as mentioned in my other reply, I think Rails is probably the closest competitor and can do most (although not everything) of what Laravel can. Django is the third option I think comes very close.

Admittedly, limiting the selection to first-party code might be a bit unfair to frameworks that maybe simply rely more on community-built extensions, but I have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise I guess every framework theoretically "supports" everything through some third-party module that may or may not work ;)

Re: A look at modern PHP

#236

Post by solraph »

stephenr wrote: post #154
solraph wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the parent, but it would be nice to have separate thread for things like logging and firing events into a queue.

If putting a job/event into a queue, or writing a log entry is taking so long that you need a separate thread just to enqueue/log that entry, something is dreadfully wrong with your application.

Ironically, the root cause that made me think of that example was AWS.

The example was where each SQS call (there could be as many as five) was taking between 50ms-200ms, and logging took another 75ms. The rest of the request processing time was approx 50ms.

There's a bunch of other architecture options we could have looked at, but due to the share-nothing nature of PHP, they weren't an option.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#237

Post by asdkjh345fd »

s1k3s wrote: post #112

The amount of misinformation, false claims and unsupported statements in this thread is mindblowing for the quality that I've been used to see on HN. Here are some facts: - Symfony was the backend framework with the most contributors in 2019 [1] (yes, out of any backend framework written in any language) - PHP has more active contributors than it ever had [2] - Laravel is one of the most used frameworks in the world…

>And last, people compare it to languages like Rust or Go since they consider those are "innovative"

No, they do not. The entire appeal of go is that there is zero innovation at all. It is the most plain, boring, ordinary language around. It does absolutely nothing different or neat or new or special. Instead, it focus on being simple, easy and fast. Just like PHP apologists keep claiming about PHP. The difference is go was developed by competent software developers, so it isn't a broken, buggy, inconsistent mess.

>PHP was created for website development

And yet it is outclassed for that purpose by general purpose languages like go.

>and in that area neither Go or Rust are even close to matching it in terms of maturity.

Age is not maturity. PHP is old. It is less terrible than it was 20 years ago, but it is still worse that any other language except javascript.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#238

Post by stephenr »

nsomaru wrote: post #110
simion314 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious what problem are you trying to solve, I never had the need for different threads to communicate in PHP, most of the time in my work a user makes a request, and a PHp scripts does something like update the database or does some searching/working and returns a result.

What if that request was a document upload and your system is calling out some external api or processing for long enough such that you’d rather return now and update later when the job finishes. Maybe through Ajax or a redirect. The shenanigans that WP plugin devs go through to get around the lack of a queue is ridiculous (chunk the file and keep reloading the page until we’ve processed all the chunks or have an Aja…

.... As you identified at the end, the correct solution for this problem is a job queue. There is nothing about PHP that prevents the use of a job queue - in fact the shared-nothing, process-per-request model almost encourages the developer to offload as much work as possible to a job queue..

Using Wordpress (or it's plugins) as any kind of reference for what PHP is capable of, is like using McDonalds as the basis for a cook book.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#239

Post by rhlsthrm »

thdrdt wrote: post #17

I've been using PHP for over 15 years and always liked it. There is no other webserver language that's so easy to use and so deployable while still being fast. But for larger projects the available frameworks are just okayish. I think Symfony is closest to what a good framework should be. But every time I use it I wish it would be like .NET Today .NET core is also available on Linux and very easy to deploy so I don't…

As someone with 0 experience in .NET, I'd love to hear what's so cool about it.

Re: A look at modern PHP

#240

Post by thawaway1837 »

hnarn wrote: post #147
s1k3s wrote: post #112

The amount of misinformation, false claims and unsupported statements in this thread is mindblowing for the quality that I've been used to see on HN. Here are some facts: - Symfony was the backend framework with the most contributors in 2019 [1] (yes, out of any backend framework written in any language) - PHP has more active contributors than it ever had [2] - Laravel is one of the most used frameworks in the world…

> And last, people compare it to languages like Rust or Go since they consider those are "innovative". I hope everyone understands that a language is fit for a certain type of task. PHP was created for website development, and in that area neither Go or Rust are even close to matching it in terms of maturity. I'm not disagreeing with you, but "website development" is a very broad category. For example, if you definit…

For a more or less static website, what’s probably the best bet, and has been the standard for many years, largely because it allows the non technical restaurant owner to easily update and make changes, is Wordpress.

In which case you’re back again in PHP land.

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