4 ms·

Aren't the new versions of PHP quite good?

by s3nnyy 8y ago

furicane 8y ago
They are, quite good and the performance keeps improving with every new version. We're expecting another huge performance boost with version 7.4
- AdrianB1 8y ago
  Just curious: in what scenarios did you see performance problems with PHP? In all my projects performance was more than adequate, even with 5.6 that was a few times slower than 7.x. All my current projects are 7.2, at some point I will get on 7.4 but not because I need more performance, just for bug fixes and security updates in the supported period.
tjpnz 8y ago
They are but if you're coming from Python/Ruby or even newer Java releases you will still go through a period of depression.
- la_fayette 8y ago
  Can you go more in detail about what is depressing in PHP compared to Python/Ruby or even Java? There are differences between the languages as such, e.g. PHP has traits, Python has Operator overloading, etc. From a tooling perspective I cannot tell that there is any big differences.
  - yyx 8y ago
    Little things like semicolons and no "else" in for loop
  - duckerude 8y ago
    I'm used to Python. PHP has a ton of weird flaws that seem like outright mistakes rather than unfortunate trade-offs. It really grates. spl_object_hash returns a unique id, rather than a hash. So why the name? Probably because it's formatted as a masked hex value. I had already started writing code to deal with hash collisions when I found out. The `self` and `static` keywords for accessing the current class do roughly the same thing, except `self` is static and `static` is dynamic. That's not very nice. You can't define consts on traits. If you google it, you find a reddit thread where multiple people offer creative theories of why consts on traits would violate OOP principles, and a bug report where you find out that it's because the implementation is too naive to deal with collisions. Sequential and associative arrays are the same data type, even though in practice you always use them either one way or the other. That interacts really badly with JSON (is an empty array supposed to become [] or {}?) and makes code harder to understand. Anonymous functions are called closures, but they aren't closures, unless you manually declare which variables from the surrounding scope you want to access and that you want the access to be referential. Weak typing is still around in enough places to make me paranoid. `in_array('3', ['03'])` is true (and `in_array($x, [true, false])` is true for absolutely any $x). You have to pass an extra boolean argument for strict typing, which is not nearly as easy to spot as a == operator. Relatedly, arrays can only have string or int keys, with mandatory weak typing. A string that's sufficiently int-like is converted automatically. So this code throws a type error when it reaches 3, even though it was a string when it was entered into the array: <?php declare(strict_types=1); function foo(string $s) { } $arr = ['x' => 1, ' ' => 2, '3' => 3]; foreach ($arr as $key => $value) { foo($key); } DateTime::ISO8601 does not implement ISO-8601, and is only kept around for backward compatibility with broken programs. You have to use DateTime::ATOM. There's a lot more like this. PHP is much better than it used to be, and it's very much possible to write good PHP programs, but I find it painful to use.
    - rawoke083600 8y ago
      All the things you say is true... but not really useful showstoppers. For the majority i think... sort of like how a tomato is a fruit - ja it is true but so what ?
      - duckerude 8y ago
        They're not showstoppers, but there are a lot of them and it makes the language that much more annoying to use. They don't prevent me from using PHP, but they make it unpleasant. A lot of mental effort that could be going into making sure my own code makes sense has to go into making sure that PHP's behavior makes sense and matches my mental model, more so than with many other languages. It increases friction.
        rawoke083600 8y ago
        Thats programming.... Everything is a tradeoff wheather its design or tech choices...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

Aren't the new versions of PHP quite good?

by s3nnyy 8y ago

Aren't the new versions of PHP quite good?

They are, quite good and the performance keeps improving with every new version. We're expecting another huge performance boost with version 7.4

AdrianB1 8y ago
Just curious: in what scenarios did you see performance problems with PHP? In all my projects performance was more than adequate, even with 5.6 that was a few times slower than 7.x. All my current projects are 7.2, at some point I will get on 7.4 but not because I need more performance, just for bug fixes and security updates in the supported period.

tjpnz 8y ago

They are but if you're coming from Python/Ruby or even newer Java releases you will still go through a period of depression.

la_fayette 8y ago
Can you go more in detail about what is depressing in PHP compared to Python/Ruby or even Java? There are differences between the languages as such, e.g. PHP has traits, Python has Operator overloading, etc. From a tooling perspective I cannot tell that there is any big differences.
- yyx 8y ago
  Little things like semicolons and no "else" in for loop
- duckerude 8y ago
  I'm used to Python. PHP has a ton of weird flaws that seem like outright mistakes rather than unfortunate trade-offs. It really grates. spl_object_hash returns a unique id, rather than a hash. So why the name? Probably because it's formatted as a masked hex value. I had already started writing code to deal with hash collisions when I found out. The `self` and `static` keywords for accessing the current class do roughly the same thing, except `self` is static and `static` is dynamic. That's not very nice. You can't define consts on traits. If you google it, you find a reddit thread where multiple people offer creative theories of why consts on traits would violate OOP principles, and a bug report where you find out that it's because the implementation is too naive to deal with collisions. Sequential and associative arrays are the same data type, even though in practice you always use them either one way or the other. That interacts really badly with JSON (is an empty array supposed to become [] or {}?) and makes code harder to understand. Anonymous functions are called closures, but they aren't closures, unless you manually declare which variables from the surrounding scope you want to access and that you want the access to be referential. Weak typing is still around in enough places to make me paranoid. `in_array('3', ['03'])` is true (and `in_array($x, [true, false])` is true for absolutely any $x). You have to pass an extra boolean argument for strict typing, which is not nearly as easy to spot as a == operator. Relatedly, arrays can only have string or int keys, with mandatory weak typing. A string that's sufficiently int-like is converted automatically. So this code throws a type error when it reaches 3, even though it was a string when it was entered into the array: <?php declare(strict_types=1); function foo(string $s) { } $arr = ['x' => 1, ' ' => 2, '3' => 3]; foreach ($arr as $key => $value) { foo($key); } DateTime::ISO8601 does not implement ISO-8601, and is only kept around for backward compatibility with broken programs. You have to use DateTime::ATOM. There's a lot more like this. PHP is much better than it used to be, and it's very much possible to write good PHP programs, but I find it painful to use.
  - rawoke083600 8y ago
    All the things you say is true... but not really useful showstoppers. For the majority i think... sort of like how a tomato is a fruit - ja it is true but so what ?
    - duckerude 8y ago
      They're not showstoppers, but there are a lot of them and it makes the language that much more annoying to use. They don't prevent me from using PHP, but they make it unpleasant. A lot of mental effort that could be going into making sure my own code makes sense has to go into making sure that PHP's behavior makes sense and matches my mental model, more so than with many other languages. It increases friction.
      - rawoke083600 8y ago
        Thats programming.... Everything is a tradeoff wheather its design or tech choices...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]