PHP-ORT: Machine learning inference for the web | Hacker News Reader

PHP-ORT: Machine learning inference for the web

krakjoe.github.io

88 pointsBogdanp31 comments

> Every modern application needs intelligent features

I'm not so sure about that. And I don't even know how and for what I would use any of that.

> stay relevant in an AI-first world or risk obsolescence

Damn I'm doomed :)

There's also https://github.com/symfony/ai for a more LLM focused library which it seems https://github.com/php-llm/ migrated to.

Check the photo in your pocket, are you fading? Quick, go write some AI before you disappear completely!

Interesting idea! No matter what anyone says, PHP is still used today and will be used

Thank you for working on this! Since there was no option available, we were required to use Python with some API or just plain API for the major paid models. Now with ONNX we can load open-source model and use them.

Keep up the good work and I hope this will bring a lot more packages that will make this ecosystem a little more up-to-date!

That's super cool. But do young devs/engineers even touch PHP these days? I haven't coded in it seriously for over a decade. But keep it up!

I know several people who got burn out working in the js ecosystem and who went to php instead. Finally things are quiet, stable and fast. Older people I know don't really care (I worked with IBM software in the 80s/90s, talking about slow and bloated), but the younger ones get very upset with the churn, bloat, overhead, etc.

I work in an innovation team in a tech company, we are free to choose our own stacks. I went for Laravel, one of the other engineering leads, RoR fan, went for NextJS. One of us is very happy with their batteries included stack, the other keeps telling me how much they miss RoR.

I don't know about trends among young developers, but I can tell you that the majority of the fintech world that isn't Microsoft centered (or ancient COBOL hieroglyphics) runs on PHP these days.

I ended up finding myself in finance because I had so much PHP experience from bespoke ecommerce and never left because it's everywhere.

Other language ecosystems have things I like better personally, but if you master PHP, you will never have a problem finding work.

about 6 months ago we hired a 24 aged guy as a php developer (with more than 3 year experience). so yes. with recent changes in PHP, like modernize stack, good frameworks (laravel, symfony, hyperf) and huge speed it gains from new runtimes like swoole, openswoole, frankenphp, it is really good stack to start new projects and have almost zero need for future migration to something else. i need to mention we have GO in our backend stack as well and no plan to migrate anything but in our case GO services can easily be replaced with new PHP runtimes and we would have no performance issues.

> But do young devs/engineers even touch PHP these days?

Of course! I'm 41 and still code in PHP. ;)

I know probably 10 or more young PHP devs and zero Rust devs (regardless of age).

Rust seems like something everyone talks about but no one actually uses.

PHP is great, especially with Laravel.

i know js devs switching to php, modern php is something quite different than the old one

I wish more people would. The eco system is so good.

PHP has been on a steady decline for the last 10-15 years. Its a slow process, but in the end it most likely will fade out.

This is great. Very rudimentary in this state but the right direction. What php also needs is a good lib for NLP in different languages

I wonder what Pieter Levels uses, since all of his apps are PHP based and he has a number of AI/ML offerings these days.

https://levels.io/

He's mentioned (on twitter, and his Lex Fridman interview) relying on https://replicate.com/ and https://fal.ai/ as the workhorses for his AI stuff.

So basically NumPy, but for PHP. The benchmarks look good.

Yeah, I was a little confused at all the talk about ML becoming a first class citizen in the language, when in reality it’s just a math library. (a seemingly good math library to be fair!)

I don’t know though, I feel like calling out to an API for doing ML stuff in PHP is always gonna make more sense. The compute power in services offered by AI companies are typically gonna be better than what you probably have on the server that’s running your PHP code. Unless your business is completely built around doing some kind of ML inference AND you went all in on PHP for the backend, then I guess it would make sense.

It’s still a cool extension. I myself still maintain multiple websites built with PHP. It’s not dead people!

I don’t believe that 78% of websites run on PHP

They're counting wordpress, drupal, various forums, etc. They make up a huge percentage of custom sites.

If you're talking only custom built stacks, the percentage is definitely lower, but probably still surprisingly high.

Its a "fact" PHP devs love. The truth is 95% of PHP is not actaully PHP, bit wordpress/drupal and the other cms's.

Its click, drag, click drag and the underlying tech has zero importance really.

78% of websites where it can be deduced from client side code what server side tech is used. W3tech published this statistic, and the whole community picked it up while ignoring that very important caveat.

Not a very meaningful statistic.

Anyone who cafés about security would stay away from PHP. Certainly more than 22% of the web.

Cargo-culting bs that you heard from somewhere and never bothered to fact check? Shame on you.

Oh really? Why is that. Let's talk about globals from 2005.

It’s not 2005? How is this even an argument? Age-old opinions of PHP are do not reflect the modern state of PHP and its ecosystem.

Just what we needed....

If 78% of the web is PHP, then 1799% of the web must be javascript.

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