PHP Next Generation

An anonymous reader writes "The PHP Group has put up a post about the future of PHP. They say, 'Over the last year, some research into the possibility of introducing JIT compilation capabilities to PHP has been conducted. During this research, the realization was made that in order to achieve optimal performance from PHP, some internal API's should be changed. This necessitated the birth of the phpng branch, initially authored by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui, and Nikita Popov. This branch does not include JIT capabilities, but rather seeks to solve those problems that prohibit the current, and any future implementation of a JIT capable executor achieving optimal performance by improving memory usage and cleaning up some core API's. By making these improvements, the phpng branch gives us a considerable performance gain in real world applications, for example a 20% increase in throughput for Wordpress. The door may well now be open for a JIT capable compiler that can perform as we expect, but it's necessary to say that these changes stand strong on their own, without requiring a JIT capable compiler in the future to validate them.'"

Comments

Re:I got tired of waiting

[Stellian]

JS on the server is clearly big contender for PHP: it's great for quick and dirty prototyping, awful for large projects, and significantly faster than PHP.

JS is the perfect recipe for language lock-in that's even stronger than PHP: front end developers already "know" it, they write a botched version of the backend code that 10 years later turns into an incomprehensible behemoth; any attempt to rewrite it will be rejected for "performance" reasons.

Re:I'd rather code COBOL or FORTRAN

[JaredOfEuropa]

PHP is great for prototyping, throwaway scripts, or other quick & dirty stuff. But if any of that kind of code makes it into a critical production environment and turns it into a maintenance nightmare, blame the manager who allowed or ordered that, not the language.

PHP can be used for production stuff as well, if you're careful. I was involved in building a mission critical system for a large corporation, and we selected PHP since the client already had a sizable pool of experienced PHP developers. We built the system relatively quickly and had little trouble handing it over to the team handling maintenance and enhancements, and it's been running happily ever since. What helped was applying good common coding sense, such as extensive error handling, and comprehensive unit testing against the documented functionality of each module / function. I've used far worse languages...