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Comment by mscarborough | Hacker News Reader

Would like to see the same for the 'memcache' lib, which is way older and slower than 'memcached'. The older lib comes up first in most search results and there's no real way for a new PHP user to know the difference.

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The problem is that the newer/better extension, memcached (http://php.net/manual/en/book.memcached.php) relies on libMemcached (http://libmemcached.org/) and they won't release a Windows DLL for it (Google "libmemcached windows", the ensuing confusion is just the tip of the iceberg.) Until you can get PHP's memcacheD extension running on Windows boxes, there's no point to thinking about deprecating the memcache lib.

Sure nobody is really running any PHP sites on Windows boxes, but they're sure as hell developing on them. And while I get that the core PHP devs couldn't find a Windows machine if their lives depended on it, enabling coders on Windows machines is what brought them to their current size - something they've clearly forgot since http://pecl4win.php.net/ died.[/endrant]

I honestly don't understand why anyone would develop on Win and release on Linux, especially for a web-app.

VMWare Player and VirtualBox are free, and it's quite easy to setup an Ubuntu image that mimics your server platform (if you must be untethered)... alternatively put everything in the (private, if need be) cloud.

Once you've had a change to run in that kind of environment as a full-time job for 40+ hours a week, let me know...

I've been developing in a similar environment for over a year now. I have a linux VM running apache + associated software, with Samba running. I mount my code as a shared drive, and edit it that way. This means I get the power of linux + linux tools, but I can still run Windows as my primary OS.

I am perfectly happy with this setup, and haven't run across any downsides.

What is so difficult to imagine about an Ubuntu machine running server software?

I've seen it done for years in a reasonably sized team. It actually works really well in a fulltime scenario on a large project, on decent desktop boxes in an office environment.

Developers appreciated that significant config changes boiled down to: get all of your local changes into version control, then grab the newest VM image off the network drive.

It's significantly more painful when you get out of that environment. If you have lots of projects, juggling VMs is a pain. They take up lots of space. Spinning them up/down takes minutes. You don't just have one working IP/hostname/Samba mount/etc that's always there. The resource hit from running a VM is a bigger deal on a netbook. Etc..

Pretty simply: I prefer the Windows environment to Linux. I don't like GNOME or KDE. I also don't really like the OS X environment, either. (My day job requires a Unix machine because our codebase is fragile, and it's a source of some annoyance.)

For my own projects, I would rather work in Windows, with a mild annoyance when testing, than consistently be annoyed by working in either. (I do use a VM for testing before pushing to production, but for quick "is this right" testing, bouncing Django on Windows and eyeballing it is generally good enough to keep pushing forward.)

You don't have to use Linux VM for anything other than PHP + web server.

You can still develop on Windows, just instead of testing on localhost, you'd test on local VM.

I realize that, and like I said, I do for final testing. It's enough of a roadblock to rapid development for me to avoid it until I have to make sure it will work on the platform. (VMware shared folders don't always play nicely, so I end up just pushing via hg.)

I'm with you on this, but there's no need to even do it with vmare. Development boxes don't get slammed like servers, you can throw CentOS or whatever on a headless "junk" PC you found while dumpster diving, and upload your code to it for testing/development.

Hell, that's what I do and my main Desktop does run Linux, but I devel on a junk machine running Apache/PHP, PostgreSQL.

> Sure nobody is really running any PHP sites on Windows boxes, but they're sure as hell developing on them.

First part is somewhat false. Second part is very true.

Having developed, provided, and commercialized a WAMP server that was started in 2003 (http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper) I've gain some knowledge of who uses PHP on Windows.

Everyone. In all kinds of situations. There is absolutely nothing lost between hosting Wordpress on Windows vs. Linux. Security, performance, maintainability, etc.

I've also found that around 2009, half of the Apache, MySQL, and PHP downloads from their official sites where for the Windows builds.

These numbers have only gone up since then.

The Windows platform for PHP is critical to the health of PHP. Loose it, and you've lost half of the developers and about 30% of the production deployments.

I concur. A lot of people think memcache is the client and memcached is the daemon. Until you actually do some research and read the wiki page, do you understand that this is not the case.

Thus I am enlightened.

There's also a few other landmines like the "http" extension, which is not part of the standard distribution, and which is completely obsoleted by curl.

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