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Comment by melicerte | Hacker News Reader

Did you notice PHP outperforms any other scripting languages? Some report that it event beats the GNU yes implementation.

After reading here so many unfair critics and pedantic dislike over PHP[1][2][3][4][5][6], I just want to say: STFU.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12706136

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3825227

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824881

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1823022

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1819517

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1819413

... Just to name a few.

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It's almost funny that you try to refute, or rather, dismiss, criticism of PHP with "but it's fast", when none of what you cite even mentions that. I just want to say: STFU.

I don't dismiss criticism. I dismiss unfair critics. What I cite is full of that. And, btw, [6] implies PHP is slow, read on:

[quote]

It's hard to find a worse example than php, because when many "bad" languages fail in one or the other category, php seems to fail in most categories.

* Java has a really repetitive syntax, but it's libraries might make up for that.

* C++ with all it's features has bazillion ways to shoot yourself, but it's arguably fast and the syntax is bearable. ...

[/quote]

It doesn't in fact imply that PHP is slow. What it says about PHP (besides "php seems to fail in most categories" which doesn't imply any single specific failure because most != all) is this: "But php has both an ugly syntax, horrendous stdlib, and fame of security issues." You will notice that none of those specific complaints is about speed.

None of those comments are complaining about PHP being slow at repeatedly writing a string whose length is a multiple of the page size to standard output. That is a pretty niche case, and hardly refutes even the complaint that PHP is slow, much less all the complaints about PHP that aren't related to its speed.

FWIW, when I run the tests there's no substantial difference between Perl, LUA, or PHP.

PHP here is just calling c functions. The actual non-benchmark php people pay for is completely orthagonal to these results.

>>>Did you notice PHP outperforms any other scripting languages?

I am not sure what was the last time I had to choose a language by a single dimension. If we are talking about performance, scripting languages rarely shine. On the top of that, performance critical things in scripting languages are often implemented in a compiled language (like Pandas for example).

>> If we are talking about performance, scripting languages rarely shine

Except that, in the yes example, PHP shines by its performance.

Of course, you don't choose a language based on that on a single dimension, but speed is an important factor otherwise benchmarks would not exist.

while(1){write();} is about as far away as it gets from actual application code. This topic may be fun, but remains an utterly pointless micro-benchmark.

I was refering to http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/

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