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posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 24 2021, @04:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the striking-fear-into-chromas dept.

PHP Foundation Announced

The PHP Foundation has been announced as an entity for funding the work of developing the PHP language.

For more information regarding the structure and purpose of the foundation, please check out the blog post at: jetbrains.com.

This seems to be sparked by Nikita Popov, one of the main contributers to the language, switching focus to LLVM:

Nikita is leaving JetBrains as of December 1 and will spend significantly less time on PHP. As sad as it is to see him go, we congratulate Nikita and wish him every success in his new journey!

[...] In May 2021, right after Joe Watkins published his Avoiding Busses blog post, we started discussing the idea of a PHP Foundation. It's not something new and has been floating around for a long time.

[...] We were proceeding rather leisurely, thinking that the problem was not critical. However, Nikita's decision forced us to intensify our work on the foundation.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by gawdonblue on Wednesday November 24 2021, @06:59AM (14 children)

    by gawdonblue (412) on Wednesday November 24 2021, @06:59AM (#1199176)

    So it has got so complex that there is only one person left in the world that can maintain it?

    Go back to PHP 3 or 4, when Rasmus was still in charge and it was pragmatically useable. Spend time fixing that codebase, making it consistent, secure and performant, rather than letting those well-intentioned tossers turn it into yet another object-oriented pile of crap.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Wednesday November 24 2021, @08:17AM (2 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 24 2021, @08:17AM (#1199182) Journal

    JetBrains is paying a third of the foundations projected $300k annual budget. That means they call the shots regardless of how much the foundation claims it is about being a non-profit organization whose mission is to ensure the long life and prosperity of the PHP language. There's nothing about quality there in that mission statement, and refactoring is wrongly considered insufficiently useful, uninteresting, or unprofitable. Thus it is unlikely to be pursued. Lastly, if PHP's code is untangled then the small group maintaining it lose their monopoly on control.

    --
    Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @03:26PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @03:26PM (#1199215)

      With the projected donations from all the participating companies so far, we expect to raise about $300,000 per year. JetBrains intends to contribute $100,000 annually.

      We expect to be able to pay market salaries to PHP core developers. The more we collect, the more developers will be able to work full-time on PHP.

      So basically 2 developers, and a manager, because you have to pay benefits and withholding taxes. Or 50 developers in India.

      No wonder they left to work on LLVM - there's not really any money long term for developers working on advancing the php language.

      And then there's the requirement to agree to the code of conduct. Hello bureaucrats, goodbye productivity.

      Looks like all the scripting languages are hitting peak inefficiency. Actually, all languages. Even c/c++ hasn't been immune to larding unnecessary shit on the core.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday November 24 2021, @05:05PM

        by PiMuNu (3823) on Wednesday November 24 2021, @05:05PM (#1199234)

        > Even c/c++ hasn't been immune to larding unnecessary shit on the core.

        C seems to be stable AFAICT. C++ developments seem to be about 50 % useful, 50 % crud.

        Code written even a few years ago will no longer compile with a modern version of g++ - I realise this is the compiler not the language, but it is a problem nonetheless.

  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday November 24 2021, @09:05AM (10 children)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday November 24 2021, @09:05AM (#1199187) Homepage

    Not sure I see the point given that PHP's reason for continued existence is existing code, which certainly don't run on PHP 3 or 4. Wordpress says it requires 7.4 for example.

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    • (Score: 2) by bart9h on Wednesday November 24 2021, @01:57PM (8 children)

      by bart9h (767) on Wednesday November 24 2021, @01:57PM (#1199200)

      I recently used PHP to create a somewhat simple website and the login service for an application, and I found it adequate. The integration with the web server was also very easy.

      Am I wrong? What should I use instead?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @02:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @02:33PM (#1199206)

        Clearly node.js. Make all the things javascript.

        (The above is a joke)

      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by edIII on Wednesday November 24 2021, @08:38PM (6 children)

        by edIII (791) on Wednesday November 24 2021, @08:38PM (#1199332)

        PHP is a shit language. I forget the website, but there is a programmer that tears down the PHP language and gives some pretty damn good examples of why PHP is a pile of shit. I won't bother to reiterate it here. Suffice to say, PHP is collection of shit piled upon shit, piled upon more shit. It's an ecosystem of layered shit, like a smelly swamp with peanut critters running around fighting with the bits of corn.

        That being said, it's amazingly functional and easy shit to use. It IS easy to integrate with Apache or NGINX. It IS easy to create scripts run by web servers that in turn can execute local code. I've created many websites, backends, and projects using PHP. It's a very powerful and useful toolbox that gets shit done.

        It's probably never going to be something that is very secure though, or extremely performant. At least compared to other solutions. Although with that being said, you can again take a PHP script and "compile it" so that it doesn't have to be run through a script interpreter each time. There are optimizations you can do to make PHP code run much faster than normal.

        Since I'm interested in security over ease of use, I'm playing around with Perl. Not as easy to use as PHP maybe, but it is a decent alternative to PHP. As it's sort of fundamental in the BSD world, it's nice to have a webserver machine that has no PHP/Apache/Node.JS anywhere in it. Just Perl. It has a much smaller attack surface when Perl/NGINX is the only thing being used in a hardened OpenBSD server.

        Use the best tool for the job. While PHP has its drawbacks, it's functional and you can make a lot of different applications and websites that will work. You can't ignore just how much has been written in PHP that performs well and is very useful to the users who depend on it.

        You're not wrong for using it. It's a good tool that has stood the test of time with plenty of uptime for mission critical applications everywhere.

        --
        Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @10:16PM (5 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @10:16PM (#1199369)

          "you can again take a PHP script and "compile it" so that it doesn't have to be run through a script interpreter each time"

          link or explanation? are you referring to swoole and roadrunner? I can't remember how those work under the hood.

          I'm in the process of moving to OpenBSD partially due to their first class PHP support. I use a PHP framework though. Any secure, performant and featured perl web frameworks you like? I'm too lazy not to use a framework.

          Also, why are you using nginx instead of relayd and httpd?

          • (Score: 2) by bmimatt on Wednesday November 24 2021, @10:49PM (1 child)

            by bmimatt (5050) on Wednesday November 24 2021, @10:49PM (#1199375)

            It's been well over a decade since I wrote anything in PHP, so there may be newer and/or cooler things now. Back then there were compilers that generated machine code as their output and you could even use them for locking the code down, so it could not be run on different machines (a sort of basic 'licensing' tool). They may have built something similar into newer versions of PHP. The pre-compiled machine code ran a lot faster at scale. nginx scales better and is not as bloated as httpd aka. 'Swiss Army tool' of web servers.
            See this [stackexchange.com]

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 25 2021, @01:06AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 25 2021, @01:06AM (#1199397)

              "nginx scales better and is not as bloated as httpd aka. 'Swiss Army tool' of web servers."

              i think you think i'm referring to Apache web server in OpenBSD repos as apache-httpd, but i'm referring to OpenBSD's own web server, unfortunately also named httpd. :) i already use nginx for many years and also prefer it to apache but OpenBSD's httpd should be more secure and less bloated than nginx. :)

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 25 2021, @08:02AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 25 2021, @08:02AM (#1199478)

            That is just how the reference implementation used to work. Zend would compile the files into VM opcodes. By default PHP would check each file on access to see if the opcode cache was still fresh and compile as needed, but you could compile them ahead of time and usually with higher optimization settings. Current versions for PHP8 use a JIT technique for much faster results on long-running programs.

            FWIW, swoole is an async framework written in PHP and roadrunner is, or was the last time I looked, a PHP to golang bridge. Also OpenBSD's httpd isn't as flexible as nginx and while it might work well in the cases it is designed for, if you get outside of that you are either out of luck or pay the price in performance.

          • (Score: 2) by edIII on Friday November 26 2021, @09:34PM (1 child)

            by edIII (791) on Friday November 26 2021, @09:34PM (#1199838)

            link or explanation? are you referring to swoole and roadrunner? I can't remember how those work under the hood.

            It's been so long, and I wasn't the one that did it. We had a project where I was creating a rather large API library of various functions that either did work on the system locally using external scripts and schedulers, or created responsedocs for a front-end website handled by others. The API ended up becoming quite large. Instead of trying to compile thousands of lines of code each time, the sysadmin would take a production version of the API and change it to bytecode. He told me that he essentially bypassed the compile step and executing the bytecode for each API call. My memory is too fuzzy now to recall it all at this point. It was nearly 10 years ago.

            I'm in the process of moving to OpenBSD partially due to their first class PHP support. I use a PHP framework though. Any secure, performant and featured perl web frameworks you like? I'm too lazy not to use a framework.

            Catalyst is the enterprise framework that some projects are built on. Mojolicious is kind of a like a lite version of Catalyst.

            Also, why are you using nginx instead of relayd and httpd?

            There was something NGINX provided that OpenBSD did not. Maybe it was etags? IIRC, it had something to do with caching and then maybe the secure login system we built. Either way, httpd just wasn't cutting it.

            --
            Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @02:46AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 27 2021, @02:46AM (#1199886)

              Yep, that sounds exactly like precompiling and preloading for the Zend VM OPcache. [php.net] Before it was built in to the Zend engine directly, there were a number of add-on and third-party cache choices. Before the Zend engine was adopted there were other techniques that were similar that could be used for files not executed directly.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @03:14PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 24 2021, @03:14PM (#1199211)

      If Wordpress is the answer you're asking the wrong question.

      And please don't cite its popularity as justification - that's like the old "Eat shir - 10 trillion flies can't be wrong" posters from the 60s.