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Comment by atarian | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping for an actual desktop app powered by PHP, which would be really cool having PHP as a desktop runtime.

Lol, what? Haven't heard of this... What's your experience with nativePHP?

While i am a defender of modern (!) php for web applications, this does sound rather weird. But also interesting. Thanks for the link.

I wonder though how "native" this is? Glancing over the docs it seems to be built upon tauri / electron? Not as native as i expected, but probably more native than most people would dare to think about...

I haven't used it for anything, but it is developed by some friends of mine. It's certainly a novel approach! And they got it working on iOS too

Lol indeed... I also still love PHP. For most small apps that's my go to backend, because who needs to worry about keeping Node running on some server you forgot about 2 years ago? And it's a fully modern language.

I'm delighted that there's some kind of desktop API here. On the one hand, the fact that it's talking with an Electron shell seems sort of magical. But it begs questions like, why wouldn't I just use a fully JS stack? And... since I've never created a graphical app in PHP before, would this be the right time to start?

I'd also say ...patterns like this that return the object you modified in PHP weird me out, even though they're common in JS going back to JQuery:

>> Dialog::new() ->title('Select a file') ->open();

It's an interesting "modern"-ish design choice, but it doesn't feel very PHP-ish. $dialog = new Dialog('title') followed by $dialog->open() would feel more sane.

That heavily depends on the framework you use. Laravel uses call chains a lot, and with PHP 8.4 (or even 8.3?) you can chain on new:

  new Dialog()->title('Select a file')->open();

Just from a high level, chains on 'new' are actually kind of awful. They're bad in a world like JS where lots of classes need to call async functions to spin up, but they're desperately worse in PHP where you really have to consider everything to be a blocking call. Something basic like this could easily hang a whole thread if, e.g. the title chose to read from a remote file. And it would be quite hard to tell what was hanging it. This is when it feels like PHP is getting out over its skis. I understand the desire to keep up with the Joneses, but there's no real penalty to writing your example in three lines rather than one. It's not really functional either way, and it's not especially debuggable either.

How would it make a difference if you split the statements up? A bad API is a bad API, and I’m pretty sure you can design one in any language (e.g. hide a while (true) within an innocuous method). The way to trace it down is the same in PHP as elsewhere, too—use a debugger. All that said, just don’t design shitty APIs and give your methods useful names.

An advantage of being able to chain calls are fluent expressions that you can return immediately, for example from arrow functions or match expressions, which definitely makes for easier to read code.

I can't think of a lot of examples where I'd want to call:

new API()->object->method()->subResult

particularly if the API might block. But I can think of a lot of reasons I wouldn't want to see that in my codebase. Usually starting with the fact that

try {

$api = new API();

}

should have a catch after it.

For local stuff, fine, if you want to write that way. I don't find it eminently more readable than seeing a variable created and employed. And I'd like to see the line number the error was thrown on, if I'm reading error logs in production.

For what it's worth, blocking might not be an issue in the future. There's some discussion on the PHP mailing list about adding async capabilities to the language.

That would be a welcome language feature... my only question would be, how? Node accomplishes it by basically deferring things throughout the main loop. PHP has no main loop; it's not a webserver. The PHP paradigm is terribly ugly but very predictable in one way: You just rely on Apache or Nginx to spin up and kill a new PHP process with each call. In order for a call to last long enough to return something async, you can't rely on checking it the next cycle. There is no next cycle. So anything "async" basically blocks at the end, unless PHP sprouts its own endless loop the way Node does. And then you probably don't want more than one of them running. So it runs contrary to the paradigm.

Many years ago (see my profile), I wrote a PHP socket server that worked a little bit like Node does. The server itself was a CLI daemon. The webserver sent all the API calls to a normal PHP script that acted as a dispatcher. If the dispatcher saw that the daemon wasn't running, it would call the endpoint itself, block and return a result. If the daemon was running, it would accept an external socket connection to the user and keep itself alive, and open an internal socket to the daemon to route the user's API calls through, which would end up in a queue held by the daemon. The daemon responded to the dispatcher over the internal socket, and the dispatcher sent the results to the user as they came in over the external websocket. Thus it went from one PHP process per call to one PHP process per user, kept alive as long as the daemon was running. I actually think this was niftier in some ways than Node, because no one user could hang the whole server - only their own thread. This was a semi-solution for async calls in PHP.

And, if you want or need to spawn new PHP processes as workers that chew on lots of data, and wait for them to send messages back, you can already do that in a multitude of different ways... as long as the main process waits for them, or else aborts.

In any case, blocking API calls inside a multi-part single line of code are lazy and an invitation to disaster.

Sibling mentioned nativephp, but PHP-GTK[0] was also a thing in the past!

[0]: https://gtk.php.net

I am aware modern PHP is actually pretty good, but having grown up with PHP in the 2000s I can't help but get chills up my spine every time I read '$nonWebThing written in PHP'

I've seen massive cli apps and services written in PHP, it's actually pretty good for that sort of thing and given no build or compile step the devex is quite nice.

There's trade offs of course but for things where disk or network is the bottleneck it performs just fine.

And Delphi for PHP.

Alas

...would it?

I guess maybe if it was PHP8 only...

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