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PHP 7.0 Nearing Release, Performance Almost As Good As HHVM
An anonymous reader writes: PHP 7.0 RC2 was released on Friday. In addition to the new language features, PHP 7.0 is advertised as having twice the performance of PHP 5. Benchmarks of PHP 7.0 RC2 show that these performance claims are indeed accurate, and just not for popular PHP programs like WordPress. In tests done by Phoronix, the PHP performance was 2~2.5x faster all while consuming less memory than PHP 5.3~5.6. Facebook's HHVM implementation meanwhile still held a small performance lead, though it was consuming much more memory. PHP 7.0 is scheduled to be released in November.
Oh please. I work for a VC firm and do due diligence. While the guys doing server-side Java and C# are still talking about frameworks, the PHP guys are typically already supporting thousands or even millions of users. Yes, getting a good, bug-free v2 out the door is a challenge with PHP, most startups fail before even finishing a good v1. You can't get to v2 if you don't finish v1! I don't think the usual estimate that PHP is ten times as productive is far from the truth. For good, solid server-side code, I don't think you can beat Java with Spring, but it takes a lot longer and is a lot harder and more expensive to find engineers. Despite the fact our entire board and investors are made-up with former Microsoft people, the vast majority of successful startups we've funded have used PHP.
So from an entirely awful language and environment to just an almost entirely awful one?
Sure. Lots of folks use PHP for writing quick server code, because it makes light work of prototyping things. If you know what you're doing, it is a solid programming language, offering a fairly clean, C-like syntax, without the horror of Perl's backwards instructions and bare regular expressions, the OO bloat of Java, the need to install additional interpreters (problematic on shared hosting services), etc.
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Cue if you're playing snooker or pool
... or if you're calling for someone to begin their performance, as in the OP.
PHP 6 was supposed to be the version after PHP 5.2 (or was it 5.1?).
However, there where huge snags related with the unicode, which was delaying everything over and over again.
The end result was that PHP 6 functionalities where cut down and released in subsequent 5.x release in more manageable release steps.
PHP is a solid language, i just find it infuriating that after all this years, they still didn't realized that to make it a proper language they will need to do some code cleanup in the core of it, specially with the dreadful refresh loop which forces every request to reload the code.
The opcache alleviates the problem, but it is just a band-aid.
And language uniformity is something that was always talked about since PHP 4, and never addressed. Even after 15 years of PHP you will still refer to the manual because it is impossible to memorize all the different function names. Is it strlen, str_len or string_length? What comes first the needle or the object?
And then, there is always the problem of the "script" culture. Bashing a couple of lines of code can solve one problem, but is the code maintainable? Most probably not.
Proper use of software engineering processes is something that still needs to get into the head of most developers of PHP.
And nope, just having unit tests is not a solution if your tests are crap.