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PHP 7.0 Nearing Release, Performance Almost As Good As HHVM

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

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.

9 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Is php even relevant any more?

    It seems to be exclusively In the domain of non programmer - the kinds who constantly pump out insecure code.

    And boy there is a lot of insecure web apps. I don't run php on a public facing server. For me it's the server version of flash on the desktop. You just know there's another joke just around the corner.

    1. Re:Relevance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, it's pretty much a garbage language. Inconsistent, full of insecure pitfalls, goofy syntax and overall completely horrendous. I had the misfortune of dealing with it for years. Never again.

    2. Re:Relevance? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I would say that nodejs is now a better choice for anything that would be otherwise done with php.

      You know a language really sucks when switching to JavaScript is considered an improvement.

    3. Re: Relevance? by jon3k · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Python, Ruby or node.js. I think PHP gets a bad rap, personally. Sure its inconsistent and kind of clunky, but it's very approachable, relatively fast and runs everywhere. But it's also got a big messy history behind it, and it's an easy target to poke fun at.

    4. Re:Relevance? by Bert64 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's more like visual basic... Easy for people to learn, so attracts a lot of novice programmers who write poor code.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
  2. PHP works well, if you know what you're doing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've written several commercial grade, industry wide web applications in PHP... can't consider a time when someone has hacked the site, jacked the site, or basically screwed it over because of some piss poor LANGUAGE flaw.

    A great developer is what matters.

    And I've seen my fair share of perl code that was completely stupid, filled with security holes and bugs up the ass.

    Honestly, I've been using PHP for twelve years, and Java, C++, and C# for about as much... and frankly wonder WTF sort of mind it takes to even create a shitty application in the first place.

    Am I an exception to the rule? Probably. But I'm excited for PHP 7. It works... if you know how to make it work.

    I've seen enough shit websites built in PHP, and ASP, and perl, and C#, and JSP/Java... WTFever... and frankly, its not the language that's the problem.

    1. Re:PHP works well, if you know what you're doing. by Pikoro · · Score: 3, Insightful

      nail
      head

      --
      "Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
  3. Re: NodeJS by Billly+Gates · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But but it is webscale with the complexities of assembler with the efficiency of Javascript

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  4. Performancce is not what the HHVM is about by EmperorOfCanada · · Score: 3, Insightful

    My theory about the HHVM is that you have all this top talent at FB who are forced to either use PHP to work on the core product or they can use other languages but not hang out with the core developers. Thus the HHVM would be much like the JVM in that it would allow for PHP to be end run and other languages could run inside the VM.

    Also working on the VM would appeal to the academic pseudo cred that they want while working at the very heart of FB. In theory this end run will allow these top tier developers to go to conferences and say, I am a core developer at FB, I work on the key features, but I am not a pathetic hack using PHP, I am a god programming in (Haskell, Lisp, Scala, Go, Rust, R, Erlang, etc) and thus I am beyond mere mortals who program in the pedestrian languages that are so far beneath me that can barely think about them.

    All this without spitting in Zuckerberg's face and telling him his life's work was done like a two bit hack using the tools of a nube.

    But some of the wind might be taken out of their sails if PHP 7 comes along and eats at the main metric that they can use to justify this end run. I suspect that somehow stats will be pulled out that show that under carefully crafted circumstances that lowly mortals can barely understand that HHVM is so much better than PHP 7 that it completely justifies the massive efforts that have gone into HHVM.

    The real test will be to see if some organizations such as Wikipedia then dump HHVM to return to the less complex deployment environment found in PHP 7.