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I haven't used PHP as a daily workhorse in a decade, so I guess I don't understand why I would want a web server in pure PHP? Nginx exists.

carlosjobim 7d ago
[flagged]
- Capricorn2481 7d ago
  What a tedious reply. They're genuinely asking what the technical reasons for wanting that would be. You're reading it in the silliest way possible.
  - carlosjobim 7d ago
    PHP is stil the backbone of the internet and a great tool. I don't think that anybody has to explain why people would want to use it. If somebody doesn't want anything to do with PHP that's their decision, but why clog up the threads? And every HN post has a similar dismissive comment. Why? Unless you think HN is a personal inbox...
    - nashashmi 7d ago
      They are asking about why would you need an alternate system? What is the technical reason behind it? What’s the disadvantage in the current system? All while acknowledging that they used to work in PHP and haven’t recently so they understand a lot less.
    - Capricorn2481 7d ago
      If you read the comment for more than half a second you'd see they're not questioning why someone would use PHP. They're asking why you would use this particular server over nginx/apache, given how robust their support is. Signed, a PHP developer.
stackskipton 7d ago
It's generally easier to have language self-host itself because at scale, you will be running multiple instances of the application so instead of Ingress Controller -> Go self-hosted/Python Uvicorn, it becomes Ingress COntroller -> Apache -> PHP and if developer modifies the Apache in ways you are not expecting, stuff can break.
- bawolff 7d ago
  I mean at scale you probably have TLS termination -> caching layer -> webserver -> fpm -> php. All probably written in different languages. I find this argument kind of unconvincing. At scale you want your components to be rock solid. This project is an interesting experiment, but i would never use it at scale until it matures a lot more.
  - kstrauser 7d ago
    I agree. Nginx, Caddy, Apache, etc have found and fixed a million edge cases you'd never think of just from reading and implementing the spec. I guarantee there's code in each of these along the lines of: # Send an extra 0x20 space character after this header's value, because # otherwise Chrome on Android 15 shifts into compatibility mode and # it takes 37x longer to render the page, which everyone will blame on # "the slow webserver". The spec doesn't say we *can't* add this, and # tells clients to ignore trailing space, and we've tested this with 483 # other clients to demonstrate that it doesn't cause problems. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Now, as a very cool hack, or for easier local development with one less dependency, or just to scratch a personal itch and see if it can even be done, right on! That's clever and I'm glad they did it! BTW, in your showdead (for wholly unclear reasons) comment about it using copy-on-write RAM semantics, that's just the Unix process model. The OS does all that courtesy of fork() and the server gets it for free.
  - stackskipton 7d ago
    First off, alot of companies don't have caching layer. It's not different languages, it's the fact that you have really capable webserver underneath. It's HAProxy -> Apache -> PHP vs HAProxy -> Golang (Net/HTTP) or HAProxy -> Python (Uvicorn) with a lot less knobs to manipulate. I'm Ops person who has supported larger PHP applications. I've had several outages because PHP developer dropped some Apache config to "fix" something that caused HAProxy to disconnect. I've almost never had this with Uvicorn or Net/HTTP.

carlosjobim 7d ago

[flagged]

Capricorn2481 7d ago
What a tedious reply. They're genuinely asking what the technical reasons for wanting that would be. You're reading it in the silliest way possible.
- carlosjobim 7d ago
  PHP is stil the backbone of the internet and a great tool. I don't think that anybody has to explain why people would want to use it. If somebody doesn't want anything to do with PHP that's their decision, but why clog up the threads? And every HN post has a similar dismissive comment. Why? Unless you think HN is a personal inbox...
  - nashashmi 7d ago
    They are asking about why would you need an alternate system? What is the technical reason behind it? What’s the disadvantage in the current system? All while acknowledging that they used to work in PHP and haven’t recently so they understand a lot less.
  - Capricorn2481 7d ago
    If you read the comment for more than half a second you'd see they're not questioning why someone would use PHP. They're asking why you would use this particular server over nginx/apache, given how robust their support is. Signed, a PHP developer.

stackskipton 7d ago

It's generally easier to have language self-host itself because at scale, you will be running multiple instances of the application so instead of Ingress Controller -> Go self-hosted/Python Uvicorn, it becomes Ingress COntroller -> Apache -> PHP and if developer modifies the Apache in ways you are not expecting, stuff can break.

bawolff 7d ago
I mean at scale you probably have TLS termination -> caching layer -> webserver -> fpm -> php. All probably written in different languages. I find this argument kind of unconvincing. At scale you want your components to be rock solid. This project is an interesting experiment, but i would never use it at scale until it matures a lot more.
- kstrauser 7d ago
  I agree. Nginx, Caddy, Apache, etc have found and fixed a million edge cases you'd never think of just from reading and implementing the spec. I guarantee there's code in each of these along the lines of: # Send an extra 0x20 space character after this header's value, because # otherwise Chrome on Android 15 shifts into compatibility mode and # it takes 37x longer to render the page, which everyone will blame on # "the slow webserver". The spec doesn't say we *can't* add this, and # tells clients to ignore trailing space, and we've tested this with 483 # other clients to demonstrate that it doesn't cause problems. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Now, as a very cool hack, or for easier local development with one less dependency, or just to scratch a personal itch and see if it can even be done, right on! That's clever and I'm glad they did it! BTW, in your showdead (for wholly unclear reasons) comment about it using copy-on-write RAM semantics, that's just the Unix process model. The OS does all that courtesy of fork() and the server gets it for free.
- stackskipton 7d ago
  First off, alot of companies don't have caching layer. It's not different languages, it's the fact that you have really capable webserver underneath. It's HAProxy -> Apache -> PHP vs HAProxy -> Golang (Net/HTTP) or HAProxy -> Python (Uvicorn) with a lot less knobs to manipulate. I'm Ops person who has supported larger PHP applications. I've had several outages because PHP developer dropped some Apache config to "fix" something that caused HAProxy to disconnect. I've almost never had this with Uvicorn or Net/HTTP.