How PHP will Fare in 2017? | Hacker News Reader

How PHP will Fare in 2017?

cloudways.com

12 pointsing33k12 comments

I'd say the future is bright, especially considering the performance increases in PHP7. Now it's both super productive with its huge ecosystem and fast enough for any but the very largest of sites.

> The first and the most probable trend is the complete dominance of PHP 7.x in all aspects of PHP development.

I don't see how this conclusion follows from anything in the article. As long as big players (specifically WordPress) hold down minimum version requirements, and shared hosting providers decline to upgrade, a very large percentage of PHP will still be run in pre-7.0 environments.

The professional PHP types will go to 7.0, but people developing commercially for WordPress are kind of stuck. And people developing professionally for WordPress are ~25% of the PHP ecosystem, if I had to guess.

As much as it pains me, I wouldn't be surprised to see it take until 2019 or 2020 for PHP7 to truly displace PHP 5.x. It took PHP 4 that long to disappear.

I agree that it will take a while to see 5.x disappear, but hopefully not as long. I know there are many hosting companies that are lagging behind the times, but it should move faster since the market affords easier upgrade paths. The shared host that I have been using for years has had the option to migrate easily from 5.x to newer releases and now has 7 available. They took years to support reasonable versions of 5, but now it's a two-click process to switch versions and you can even downgrade. I am shocked that there are still hosts who haven't implemented easier PHP upgrade options and why people would continue to pay them for service when for the same price they could get better service. Old habits, lock-in or neglect will slow down PHP 7 adoption, not access or financial burden.

I think PHP needs to get async/await as soon as possible. I don't know how well it works in Hack but PHP7 was supposed to be written with asynchronous tasks in mind but I didn't see anything concrete since then.

A lot of NodeJs code is written just to parallelize API/DB calls and I'm sure PHP would be sufficient in a lot of cases.

I know there's libraries but good luck getting widespread enterprise adoption of those.

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