Re: Ruminations on PHP 5++

From: Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 20:59:48 +0000
Subject: Re: Ruminations on PHP 5++
References: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9  Groups: php.internals 
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On 1/24/14 2:41 PM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

On 1/24/14, 12:27 PM, Rick Widmer wrote:

On 1/24/2014 1:14 PM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

PHP is and should remain:

1) a pragmatic web-focused language
2) a loosely typed language
3) a language which caters to the skill-levels and platforms of a wide
range of users



Please don't forget

4) a template system for generating dynamic web pages.


I would categorize that under "web-focused", but yes, hopefully that
part goes without saying.

-Rasmus


Something else we should be thinking about is that "web focused" has been changing.  When PHP 5 came out, the web still consisted almost entirely of request-response-end workflow, which PHP does very well. However, "web focused" now needs to deal with websockets, server-sent events, asynchronous IO, HTTP 2 (persistent connections and multiple responses for a single request), "lots of small callback requests" and other things where PHP, or at least mod_php, is not well suited at all.  The "shared nothing, every request is its own world" has a lot of benefits, but also limitations.

(The folks over at ReactPHP / Ratchet, for instance, have had to re-implement a ton of libraries to make them async so that they can do async logic, which has huge performance benefits if done properly.)

I do not want to turn this into another threads debate, but we probably should consider if better general support can be given for less-traditional models, which are becoming more common for the web.

--Larry Garfield

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