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PHP 8.4.4 Released
- someothherguyy 2y agoOne wonders, why is a minor release announcement for PHP on the front page?
- tobinfekkes 2y agoMaybe it's like the silent majority: PHP developers have been made fun of for so long, they don't speak up. But there's millions of them hanging around the interwebs, keeping everyday systems maintained for normal people that are not flashy, but simply get the job done because it's stable and works. Source: a PHP developer ;P But I agree, a minor release is hardly news worthy
- pilif 2y agoNone the less - this was a scheduled minor release with no new features and no security relevant patches. As a PHP developer myself, I'm still not clear as to why that warrants a submission to HN, much less a promotion to the front page.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoEh, we aren't that traumatized. A decade and change of watching other groups of coders stick forks in outlets chasing Google's codebase has done wonders for our self esteem.
- darthrupert 2y agoIs it really php developers that have been made fun of? I thought it was php itself that gets ridicule.
- mckravchyk 2y agoThis is a sabotage so the next major release doesn't get any attention ;)
- duskwuff 2y agoSlightly more interesting changelog: https://www.php.net/ChangeLog-8.php#8.4.4 https://www.php.net/ChangeLog-8.php#8.4.4 That being said, this is a pretty boring release. Save the upvotes for 8.5 when it comes? :)
- satvikpendem 2y agoHow is PHP's speed these days? I haven't been following but I heard that PHP has become much more capable in features and performance since I used it a decade ago.
- Minor49er 2y agoYes, it has come quite a ways in the last decade. Maybe you should take it for a spin
- phplovesong 2y agoSlow. Its faster than in PHP5 era, but benchmarks usually are misleading. Eg PHP does "less" making it faster for SOME tasks. If you include all unicode parsing, error handling etc PHP is still very slow. Take Go as an alternative. Has unicode etc but still lots faster than PHP.
- bornfreddy 2y agoGo is not an alternative to PHP, and I say this as someone who likes (and uses) Go. It is more performant, yes, but it is also very verbose - I would hate to develop a CRUD (web) app in it. Not to mention that any data handling is more or less manual. Great language for some services, but not for a webapp. Also PHP is far from slow. The code is precompiled ("cached") and the common operations are optimized as hell. IME the slow apps are usually just missing some MySQL indexes or similar.
- phplovesong 2y agoPHP is slow, as an example we generate (somewhat complex pdf documents from a sourced html file), and it takes PHP multiple seconds to parse and generate the document. We since rewrote this in Go and now it runs in milliseconds. This is pure CPU bound (the IO is only opening a file and not a bottleneck) and PHP is still very slow for anything more complex.
- conradfr 2y agoIt's decent enough with opcocode cache, preloading etc but not amazing. I haven't try things like FrankenPhp though.
- TekMol 2y agoPHP needs modules. The way it solves code reuse by tooling that helps making class names longer to avoid collisions is just too cumbersome. Python: calc.py ------- def sum(a, b): return a+b hello.py -------- import calc print(calc.sum(1, 2)) PHP: LongUniqueStringToHopefullyAvoidCollisions/Calc.php --------------------------------------------------- <?php namespace LongUniqueStringToHopefullyAvoidCollisions; class Calc { public static function sum($a, $b) { return $a + $b; } } hello.php --------- <?php require_once 'LongUniqueStringToHopefullyAvoidCollisions/Calc.php'; use LongUniqueStringToHopefullyAvoidCollisions\Calc; echo Calc::sum(1, 2) For people who don't know PHP it is probably hard to grasp and hard to believe: To avoid name collisions, you have to wrap your code in classes and then use the "namespace" and "use" keywords which function like prefixing the class names with a given string, so the class names hopefully do not collide with other class names in your codebase.
- ulrischa 2y agoPHP has namespaces: https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.php But what is the difference writing abc\classname or abc_classname? Long classnames ist not a big problem
- xcjs 2y agoIt has Composer: https://getcomposer.org/ https://getcomposer.org/
- TekMol 2y agoComposer adds even more tooling around the fundamental problem that PHP does not have modules. And it does not do away with the problem that you have to preemptively wrap everything in classes and add a LongUniqueStringToHopefullyAvoidCollisions via the "namespace" and "use" keywords to all your classes to hopefully avoid name clashes in the future.
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
- lbj 2y agoDoes anyone know specifically how much of this is no longer true? https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
- jonwinstanley 2y agoHuge progress in PHP since 2012. Still gets dunked on, still powers a big chunk of the web.
- watt 2y agoHave they got rid of $ sigils everywhere? Are they planning to?
- conradfr 2y agoNo and no and nobody (using php) probably cares.
- bornfreddy 2y agoYeah that's ugly, but it doesn't really matter. What is worse is inconsistencies when declaring class vars and constants... But you learn to live with it.
- phplovesong 2y agoLuckily PHP pop has declined drastically since 2010. Its barely holding on as a top10 language. We can all hope it dies some day. We need better and faster software, realtime and unicode aware. We dont need more php.
- jonwinstanley 2y agoEven if popularity % is decreasing, in real numbers, number of sites/projects that use PHP is enormous. It will outlive us all for sure.
- 2y ago
- phplovesong 2y agoStill no builtun unicode. Still no way to do concurrency. Sees like PHP is only getting closer to become a poormans Java.
- johnisgood 2y agoI would never use Java for web or for anything else, PHP more so. Kind of a bait comment, tbh.
- phplovesong 2y agoFor web there is SO many better alternatives in 2025. There is zero reason to pick PHP. Literally.
- johnisgood 2y agoWhich ones do not require JavaScript AT ALL? Simple use-case: in which language may I make a CAPTCHA that does not require JavaScript? What about a full-blown e-commerce website?
- phplovesong 2y agoWhat does a server side languge has to do with captcha? What are you on?
- johnisgood 2y agoCase in point, then. I made a PHP CAPTCHA that requires no JavaScript, so pretty much everything? What would a client-side language have to do with CAPTCHA? Kind of defeats the purpose of it, or rather, what it (server-side) does not have to do with it?
- solumunus 2y agoGo. C#. Kotlin. I could name many. I think you’re confused.
- tored 2y agoA great bug fix release on a great major release. Thank you to everyone involved to make this possible.