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Things you should know about PHP 7

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Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#91

Being a PHP dev since the early 00's it's great to see the language moving forward with features and performance and seemingly less hate towards it from the developer community at large. For a while there seemed to be a "PHP-shaming" thing going around. If you did PHP you were sort of in an untouchable uncool class.

Meh...PHP devs think they've got bad here?

I still have to knock out Classic ASP now and again. My dad found out and won't even look at me or answer the phone :)

Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#92
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's to do with having been rebuilt with Symfony components. That's not to say symfony is, by necessity, slow, but I going to guess that completeness and stability was first for such a big change before performance. But... that's just a guess.

I think it is exactly the fact that they are using Symfony components. Symfony and a lot of other PHP frameworks went head first into the non-sensical enterprise Java abstraction and IoC hell from 10-15 years ago that current Java developers are running as fast as they can from. That overhead comes at a cost.

Hrm... I got a few down votes for my guess (well, I started with "I'd say that..." but it was later qualified as a supposition. I also wasn't making a judgement call that it was bad - just observing that they made a big architectural change, and performance probably wasn't the primary consideration for rev 1. Weird...

Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#93
post #24
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>... and available on general cheap webhosting sometime around 2020. If we're lucky. Shared Hosting needs to die off anyway.

Okay, sure, instead your new job is to play security and sysadmin for the DigitalOcean containers for all the small local business Wordpress sites for say $10 an hour. Shared Hosting has many downsides, but it still fills an incredibly important niche for businesses for whom a web presence beyond a Facebook page is needed but real managed hosting is completely out of their price range.

Lol, I'm in the middle of doing this - moving from shared hosting to a DO droplet. It is painful. Setting up the server isn't so bad but email is a nightmare. Unfortunately the large email providers are moving to block a lot of smaller servers it seems which might make it harder in the future at present using an SPF seems to get mails through.

DO of course have a Wordpress appliance which makes it pretty easy to set up, if you can manage Wordpress you can do it, so long as you're not concerned with getting in to the details of security of your droplet. It's probably no less secure than a lot of virtual hosting arrangements with 777 access on content folders and such.

[If anyone wants a free $10 credit for DO then feel free to message me.]

Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#94
post #55

The spaceship is actually a lot cooler than many PHP devs realize. Rails devs find it extremely handy. Now that my PHP apps are moving away from being big apps that render full web-pages, and towards being a thin application layer that just renders JSON, I'm finding a higher % of my code is just sorting operations. Closure has helped a lot with this, and nearly all my s are almost certainly going to be in the form of…

> Now that we're finally actually making a proper PHP spec, I'm not as excited about 4 and 5 as they'd like us to be. I was the only person who seemed to care much about the spec, and I quit. The spec has several broken tests, numerous omissions and inaccuracies, and doesn't mention any of the really important PHP 7 features. I'm not too optimistic.

All true, but practically speaking I don't know how complete the spec needs to be. Looking at the HHVM project, they fail a lot of the basic PHP unit tests, yet also have 100% parity with nearly every major CMS/framework there is. PHP is just old, and as gone without a spec so long that there's a whole pile of code that nobody ever touches anymore. Simply implementing a subset of the spec, like HHVM has, is really all I need.

Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#95
Between PHP 7 and HHVM, and what appears to me to be an increasingly fragmented community, I decided to jump ship to Ruby on Rails as my development platform of choice for web apps.

This is not to say that PHP won't work fine for many people; I just don't care for the (several) directions PHP is going in.

Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#96

Good to see PHP slowly improving, although I haven't used it for years now. On a side note, does anyone know why Drupal 8 is apparently so absurdly slow? I know it's not entirely fair to compare against D7 as it's still technically "under development" but it just seems insane to take that much of a performance hit for nicer OOP semantics...

If you consider bolting on whatever feature the php developers can wrap their heads half way around, as "improving", then sure..

See this reddit comment,

http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/2zhg6z/how_true_is_this...

and tell me what you think about it. When stuff like this exist, does it matter if it gets all the shiny new features and speed improvements? Not to mention that by php's development culture, these new features probably end up half baked and with it's own set of weird behaviors...

Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#97

Good to see PHP slowly improving, although I haven't used it for years now. On a side note, does anyone know why Drupal 8 is apparently so absurdly slow? I know it's not entirely fair to compare against D7 as it's still technically "under development" but it just seems insane to take that much of a performance hit for nicer OOP semantics...

I'm sure D8 is a lot slower--isn't performance usually the last thing worked before release?--but I don't think D7 has really been distinguished by its speed either. In my experience, D7 speed tuning consists almost entirely of inserting and tuning cache layers at every level. In other words, working around the slowness of the application.

Drupal seems great for a content-heavy site that caches well. Personally, I would not build an account-based, heavily personalized web app in Drupal unless I knew the audience was pretty small.

Even in the dinky D7 sites I've run, we got significant performance improvements just by handing off search and commenting to services other than Drupal (SOLR and Disqus).

Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#98

Between PHP 7 and HHVM, and what appears to me to be an increasingly fragmented community, I decided to jump ship to Ruby on Rails as my development platform of choice for web apps. This is not to say that PHP won't work fine for many people; I just don't care for the (several) directions PHP is going in.

Not sure what you mean.

I have not detected any fragmentation. In fact, HHVM's speed of development has been a much needed kick in the pants to PHP.

Re: Things you should know about PHP 7

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OH man I want that Null coalesce operator so bad...

I feel like I've needed that since I first started coding PHP 17 years ago!

I feel like I want to test what happens if you put values like "", false, " ", 0, an empty array, etc etc etc in front of ??.

Because, you know, this is PHP.

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