Of course, there's a vast ecosystem still running shopping carts, forums and whatnot. It's much more prevalent that you seem to think. Just because it's not cool anymore (or well ever) doesn't mean it's dead.

That's a very dated view of PHP. Modern PHP is far "cooler" than it was a few years ago. Just look at the entire https://laravel.com ecosystem — the most starred web framework on all of GitHub, across all languages, is Laravel.

Discovering Laravel a couple of years ago was perhaps one of the most significant things that made PHP interesting again after 20+ years of working with PHP.

It's refreshing (as far as PHP goes) and worth checking out with an open mind. Performance on the other hand, that take a little more work.

Performance keeps getting better, particularly with PHP 7 and 8. And just last week, “Laravel Octane” was announced... it lets you serve a Laravel app using Swoole, and early benchmarks on a MacBook Pro suggest 25k+ HTTP requests served per second!

Cool, I'll have to get updated and checkout Laravel Octane soon after clearing a work backlog, did notice Taylor tweet something about it.

I'm guessing your benchmarks are using native php-fpm and not through docker on your MBP?

Laravel Octane is using Swoole which implements a complete webserver, so there won‘t be any php-fpm more. As you would need to restart the server for every code change, there won‘t be a performance difference between docker on mac and non-docker.

I’m not too sure, I was just quoting the figures Taylor gave after his Laracon demo. I think the beta is being released next week.

Also, WordPress. WordPress is pretty much everywhere.

and there are reasons for that. As bad as it is for a developer experience, the ui for non-tech people just can't be beat.

Oh, definitely. As a blogging engine it's quite usable and very easy to get used to even for people who are IT-illiterate.

I'm not convinced it's the best for building e-commerce sites and whatever people are piggy-backing on top of WordPress nowadays.

Oh, I get that, it was more directed at the OP. It's not your Rust, Nim or Crystal or... which is what I meant about 'cool'. Coolness is always in the eye of the beholder :)

You must be living in s pretty air tight bubble.

facebook, vk, youtube, wordpress, shopify - a lot of stuff runs on php

Facebook wrote a new runtime and has, over time, changed the language rather significantly (eg strong static typing, async/await, generics, overhauled much of the standard library.) It's called Hack. At this point, I don't think you could reasonably say facebook's written in php any more than you could say various c++ projects are written in C.

https://hacklang.org/

Google would never let YouTube use PHP. I guess it did originally though.

YouTube was originally Python, not PHP.

Afaik at least facebook uses a heavily modified version of PHP ? No way they would run it pure.

VK.com also uses their own php compiler (VKCOM/kphp on github)