These days I mostly program in C, CAPL and Python but I would love to build apps in PHP.
- It is cumbersome to distribute. Rarely people have PHP installed outside of a docker container, and given quite short development lifecycle chances are their version of PHP is already outdated.
- Concurrency support in PHP is still very poor. That seems quite a big deal for a desktop app.
- NativePHP is anything but native. It relies on Electron, which is somewhat questionable on its own (even though very common nowadays).
- …And, since it pretty much is just Electron, why do I need a Laravel app underneath anyway?! If there is a job for JS, it's exactly programming UIs (primarily because there are millions of UIs and thousands UI-targeted libraries written in JS by now)
So, I am very skeptical.
The fact that is less popular now, being replaced as the "new shiny" by JS and Python as gotten alot of new devs out of the space which is what caused the vast majority of the negative press around php, it was never the language, but the fact that is was very approachable and very forgiving for new devs so alot of them did stupid things
That's just, not correct. I programmed web sites primarily in PHP back in the PHP3-5 days (and have had some jobs and contracts since, in PHP7+).
PHP, pre-5.3ish, was a bad language. It had terrible design decisions, a polluted global space, bad default configurations, weird scoping rules, function/objects with massive security holes that the developer had to patch around (the MySQL functions, being notorious) and a terrible object model. PHP5-5.3 did a lot to fix that, and 5.3+ became a usable language. PHP7 finally did a ton of work to clean up the global environment, deprecate and toss out old/buggy libraries, clean up the ABI and improve performance. They also reworked the object model completely. It is now a genuinely decent language. But it was not "always great".
Lost of things are created and never get exposure for decades after their creation
If you work in a largely PHP shop and want a quick internal tool to solve some business need or something, sure.
I don't know much about nativephp/electron/desktop ui's, but I would guess Filament is a pretty decent reason.
https://github.com/nikic/scalar_objects provides it as a plugin, but its not fully fleshed out.