I am not.

PHP is traditionally used solely for websites. Some of those have grown rather large, to the point that having engineers optimize the language is cheaper than buying more servers.

Python, on the other hand, is first and foremost a scripting language. When performance does matter, you often end up using a wrapper around a C library, like NumPy. This means there is relatively little money in optimizing the Python interpreter.

PHP is a much simpler language which helps a lot with optimizations. For instance, consider something like property access.

In PHP, doing `$a->b` accesses field `b` of object `$a`. The implementation is essentially type check (making sure `$a` is an object) and hash table lookup. If this fails, then it calls `__get` method if it exists.

In Python on the other hand, `a.b` involves `__getattr__`, `__getattribute__`, `__mro__`, `__get__`, `__set__`, `__delete__` and `__dict__`. Here is a description of how the attribute access works: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/descriptor.html#overview-of-....

PHP typically beats Python on CPU bound benchmarks: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

(Measures Python 3.10.4 against PHP 8.1.5 - so expecting these to change a bit).

Facebook dumped a ton of effort into making PHP fast over the last couple of decades. No one has been able to make Python especially fast without breaking compatibility with important libraries (Python exposed virtually the entire interpreter as its extension surface, and since Python is so slow, extensions are a major part of the ecosystem as they're the main way to recoup performance, which in turn means that changing the extension interface to make things faster would break a bunch of the ecosystem, and the Python maintainers are pretty scarred after the 2->3 breaking changes). Pypy comes close, and it has been grinding away to get compatibility, but last I checked you still couldn't so much as talk to a Postgres database through a reputable package.

It's not as surprising if you look at the primary use case of PHP. It takes a request, does a bunch of stuff, and returns the result to the web server. And it needs to do all of it before the user who clicked on the link gets bored and goes somewhere else. (Or the API client calling it times out...)

I think they did a lot of similar work to what python 3.11 did and more when releasing PHP7. I'm absolutely not in the loop but remember postings here on HN a few years ago.

Meta/FB is also pretty invested in Hack (was once a php dialect, again, out of the loop), maybe they contributed a thing or two?

PHP has always been several times faster than Python. Even more so with the speed updates post 7.

100% not shocked at all.

I recall a couple of times over the past 15-20 years where a current python significantly outperformed a current php version, but my recollection is that php was usually a bit faster, or sometimes a lot faster.

PHP 7 was released on dec 2015, and gained significant speed bumps and better memory usage, with the average php execution time being cut in half, or more, generally without any code change whatsoever. It was quite remarkable.

The path from 7.x-8.1 so far has generally seen incremental speed bumps again - usually somewhere between 3-8% improvements per release. Obviously this is going to be dependent on use cases, but overall it's been a fairly steady set of speed improvements over the last 7 years.

Clearly we need a Python to PHP transpiler (trigger word) so we can be webscale (trigger word).

PHP has always been very fast of the untyped scripting languages even from the web 1.0 days.

PHP itself is pretty fast. It's the things that people do in PHP that get slow. Most of the Yahoo frontends were rebuilt in PHP in 200x because it was fast enough and much more usable than the thing they used before(trigger warning: hf2k)

Of course, people then go and build up sculptures of objects that will be thrown away after every request, and that stuff makes everything slow (that style of code is why PHP wasn't good enough for Facebook, IMHO), but you can build trash sculpture in any language.

Back around 2003 I was hosting an internal web app for a fortune 50 company in python. It could handle 2 users at a time. I rewrote it in PHP. Scaled to hundreds with trivial work. Probably could have handled far more.

PHP 5 and onwards have had a lot of resources put int o making it fast. The surprise for me is how close Python is getting to closing that gap.