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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

It's "interesting" how they didn't bother to compare PHP 7. PHP 7 is remarkably faster than 5.x.

The newest release they're comparing against is 5.4.0 which is from 2012! There were major speed increases in 5.5, and many MUCH bigger ones in 7.

These comparisons aren't remotely fair.

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It says right on the page (prior to the graphs) that the comparison was performed in 2012. While they are using a version of PHP from 2012, they're also using a version of Phalanger (predecessor of 'peachpie') from 2012 and a .NET CLR from 2012.

As someone mentioned below - Phalanger doesn't support PHP 7. Peachpie will and as soon as we manage that, we can provide benchmarks.

That's no reason not to compare the performance. That's just silly.

It doesn't make much sense actually. Comparing Peachpie-powered PHP5 and PHP7 doesn't have all that much value. With that said we are going to do it anyway in the next week or so, but we expect PHP7 to be faster. The real value comes from comparing PHP7 with Peachpie-powered PHP7.

The language changes that happened in PHP 7 are, with maybe two exceptions (func_get_args and foreach details) not related to performance. So if you're comparing performance (and not language support), there is nothing wrong with comparing a Peachpie PHP5 implementation to a Zend PHP7 implementation. The Zend implementation does not derive any significant benefit from being PHP7 compliant (as far as performance is concerned).

Well. PHP 7 has a completely reworked opcode cache and many other tweaks that increase its performance across pretty much all applications tested (including the Zend framework itself according to Zend). With that said, however, as we mentioned earlier, we will not shy away from the comparison. We are working towards a performance benchmark that will compare Peachpie and PHP 7. But as we haven't focused on performance optimization yet at all, we don't expect Peachpie to outdo PHP 7 quite yet. Give us a few days/weeks and we'll publish the first benchmarks. We're curious as well :)

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