Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

The key difference between Java and PHP is the lack of a compilation step. I can change a line of code, press cmd+r and I see the change - whereas in Java more often than not I have to wholly restart the application container as hot-reloading is a complicated mess and tough to set up.

Also, in Java it is easy to end up with resource leaks whereas PHP always starts from a clean slate for each request. Way less headache for operations.

View on HN

> Also, in Java it is easy to end up with resource leaks whereas PHP always starts from a clean slate for each request. Way less headache for operations.

That assumes you're running a new separate PHP processes for each request and an application built this way is unlikely to scale terribly well.

> That assumes you're running a new separate PHP processes for each request and an application built this way is unlikely to scale terribly well.

No. PHP always wipes the complete execution stack even in a long lived execution model like FPM or Apache mod_php.

Right, but in a corporate production environment where everything is probably deployed compiled or compiled shortly after, does that matter? No one is altering prod code.

It certainly makes zero or almost no downtime deployments easier. Assume a Java application with a database that accesses said database during initialization - for a schema change you have to take great care in code that both the old and the new code can concurrently work on the same database to achieve low downtime.

With a PHP application, it's easier - spin up the new Docker container, disconnect the loadbalancer, do the schema change, and connect the loadbalancer to the new Docker container.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com