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> The thing that PHP does right that so few languages do is having a stateless core in the webserver. I never understood why the HN crowd always ignored this m

> The thing that PHP does right that so few languages do is having a stateless core in the webserver. I never understood why the HN crowd always ignored this massive benefit of PHP, in a world where it's becoming clearer everyday that keeping things stateless across the stack provides many benefits towards managing complex systems.

q3k 6y ago
Because this is not always a benefit. Want to cache something in between requests? You have to use memcached/redis. Want to have some background or periodic processing? Set up cronjobs, and/or use an external job queue system. Sure, if you're writing a simple CRUD app with and RDBMS backend it can be just fine. But when you're dealing with more complex work just being able to start a goroutine or use an in-memory cache structure is so much nicer than having to deal with external systems.
kstrauser 6y ago
Most of the interesting things I’ve worked on would fall down if you couldn’t cache some stuff across requests, like database connections. If every request requires a new TCP connection, even if to something lightweight and fast like a local pgbouncer instance, requests are going to be a lot slower (and the time spent context switching from userspace to kernelspace and back a lot higher) than if you could reuse one from an in-memory pool. I love stateless stuff and have started moving a lot of things to Lambdas where appropriate, but I wouldn’t use a completely stateless setup for handling large numbers of requests per unit time.
- cweagans 6y ago
  You can do that in PHP. The PHP database library has a persistent mode that you can use. See the last paragraph of example 3 + example 4 here: https://www.php.net/manual/en/pdo.connections.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/pdo.connections.php
  - kstrauser 6y ago
    Sure, but then it's no longer purely stateless, and honestly no more isolated than, say, a Django app (assuming it hasn't been deliberately broken to share state across requests).
    - cweagans 6y ago
      It's still completely stateless from the dev standpoint (even if it's not truly stateless under the hood). It's more like a caches connection if that makes sense.

q3k 6y ago

Because this is not always a benefit. Want to cache something in between requests? You have to use memcached/redis. Want to have some background or periodic processing? Set up cronjobs, and/or use an external job queue system. Sure, if you're writing a simple CRUD app with and RDBMS backend it can be just fine. But when you're dealing with more complex work just being able to start a goroutine or use an in-memory cache structure is so much nicer than having to deal with external systems.

kstrauser 6y ago

Most of the interesting things I’ve worked on would fall down if you couldn’t cache some stuff across requests, like database connections. If every request requires a new TCP connection, even if to something lightweight and fast like a local pgbouncer instance, requests are going to be a lot slower (and the time spent context switching from userspace to kernelspace and back a lot higher) than if you could reuse one from an in-memory pool. I love stateless stuff and have started moving a lot of things to Lambdas where appropriate, but I wouldn’t use a completely stateless setup for handling large numbers of requests per unit time.

cweagans 6y ago
You can do that in PHP. The PHP database library has a persistent mode that you can use. See the last paragraph of example 3 + example 4 here: https://www.php.net/manual/en/pdo.connections.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/pdo.connections.php
- kstrauser 6y ago
  Sure, but then it's no longer purely stateless, and honestly no more isolated than, say, a Django app (assuming it hasn't been deliberately broken to share state across requests).
  - cweagans 6y ago
    It's still completely stateless from the dev standpoint (even if it's not truly stateless under the hood). It's more like a caches connection if that makes sense.