This is a side effect of open source. GeSHi, and many others, suddenly stop getting maintained, and more often than not, project ownership doesn't get passed do

This is a side effect of open source. GeSHi, and many others, suddenly stop getting maintained, and more often than not, project ownership doesn't get passed down. This problem isn't unique to PHP. I have seen this is many projects across all kinds of different languages and tooling. Unfortunately, if there's no good alternative written in PHP, MediaWiki could have either reimplement it from scratch. In my opinion, GeSHi isn't the best implementation of a syntax highlighter, so I get their reason to not adopt it. Writing a syntax highlighter from scratch isn't a trivial task either. None of this says that the PHP ecosystem is dying though. MediaWiki isn't going to suddenly move away from PHP. Nor will many, many of the other big name projects that are still built on top PHP, and as long as there are big name projects, PHP ecosystem will continue to evolve. I will say choosing a Python sub-process at the sacrifice of portability (considering how many people simply run this on a PHP webhoster) is quite surprising.