In the case of PHP (a language I've used as day job for the last decade on large enterprise projects and other stuff) the speed of PHP isn't its issue. Buildin

In the case of PHP (a language I've used as day job for the last decade on large enterprise projects and other stuff) the speed of PHP isn't its issue. Building the world to throw it away on every request is..compounded by the sheer size of the stack between the PHP runtime and a response (laravel is a particular problem here out the box). You can do sorts of interesting things to get around this but there is no free lunch, they add complexity (caching, shared state, connection pooling) or change the execution model in ways you don't expect. For all that modern PHP isn't a bad language, it's not C# (my favourite pragmatic language) but it's also not as bad as 5 was and certainly not 4. It's biggest 'issue' on a wide scale is the massive disparity in skill levels covered by "PHP programmer" and how hard that makes hiring. My advice is if you are building a small system or one that is tightly constrained then Laravel isn't bad but if you are building a big system or one that will grow over time, go with Symfony, it's more work up front (though not a huge amount) but in every other way future you will thank you.