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Comment by AndroTux | Hacker News Reader

I’m a huge PHP fan. But hell, no.

Why don’t we use tools for the things they are good at? PHP as a backend server language is great, because it was built for it. Just like JavaScript is intended for web frontend applications. In my opinion, nodeJS was a mistake. It’s built upon layers of workarounds, and NativePHP looks exactly the same, just the other way around.

It’s not that hard to learn another programming language once you’ve learned one, so why not learn to code in a language that’s designed for your task, instead of trying to frankenstein some monster just so you don’t have to learn a new language?

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Seen plenty of nice nodejs backends. Seen also some serious frankenstein PHP projects. Language really doesnt matter. The people behind it do.

I would say that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Of course, people behind projects matter a lot. You can have robust and beautifully crafted PHP projects, and also horribly running, bloated and hacky Rust or Java projects. But, AndroTux has an absolutely valid point with saying that PHP was designed to run websites. Most languages have a clear focus of what they should and can do. There's the neat quote "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" and it pretty much sums up the matter. Some languages should stay with what they are made for.

Well said. I don't necessarily think that PHP can and should only do HTML rendering. Laravel for example includes a nice job queue which in my opinion makes perfect sense, as it is tightly integrated with the rest of the system, even if it's technically not what PHP was designed to do. But if you have to ship the interpreter and an entire browser just to make it work, maybe it's time to consider other options. And yes, that applies to JavaScript Electron apps as well. I can see the value in them from a business standpoint, but the amount of wasted PC resources just bugs me a lot. I don't want to waste 1 GB of memory just for a chat client.

You missed the point of this project. This lets you build a native desktop app using php and whatever front end technology you want.

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