> At least for Go and Rust, they have a much steeper learning curve.
Agree about Rust, but I should differ from Go, as a disclaimer I never used Go, but read a lot of people switching from JS to Go and they have a very easy time doing so, maybe not everyone find it easy, and also it might to happen that the architecture you are used to work with in NodeJS is similar than the one that Go uses?
> If you are a startup with limited funds you are not able to target engineers workings with those languages.
I think Ruby/Rails will help you to build your project much quicker than Php/[Laravel | Symfony].
> If it's just a matter of speed, PHP already is good enough for the great majority of cases.
Again also Ruby is pretty fast these days (if you want more speed you can use JRuby or TruffleRuby).
> If your problem is being faster than the latest versions of PHP can achieve, you can certainly look for Go/Kotlin/Rust.
Go: I should say yes, if PHP/Ruby isn't enough, this should your go to.
Kotlin: I cannot speak about it, I'm not sure how popular is in this space.
Rust: I love rust but I think this should be your last resort, if Go isn't enough
anymore.
But I can agree that work with Php is pretty easy (I worked with Php since 4.2 till 5.3, then tried it with some projects here and there with 7.x and 8.x) but I cannot stress how bad the tooling around php feels if you compare with others (ruby is bad too IMHO), JS with vscode, rust with rust-analyzer, etc. The only way I found a decent tool was with PhpStorm, but you need to pay for it (even the Laravel plugin needs a subscription), while the RubyMine is almost the same at least Rails works out of the box without an extra subscription for the plugins.