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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

> I just can't go back to PHP at this point

Same.

During 2024 I evaluated multiple backend platforms/frameworks to get away from Node. Laravel is great and modern PHP (the language) is also surprisingly good but betting on PHP feels like betting on coal and the steam engine. The runtime and execution model are extremely outdated and resource hungry.

There are some efforts like FrankenPHP and Swole that package a PHP app to have a persistent execution model. But IMO unless PHP officially adopts this model this will always feel like a hack to me.

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The job market for php devs is also weird. Very few talented people. Because php jobs on average pay the worst, people who are motivated and smart often learn another language and abandon php. There are some very practical oriented and clever people willing to do php but you have to look very hard.

Sounds like a great market for motivated, practically minded devs then right?

I'm not sure why this has been downvoted so much, this guy states something that might upset some people, but then goes on to provide a pretty sober list pros and cons. This is the kind of content that we want to encourage on HN.

It’s downvoted because even if PHP has hacky behavior; he’s running with the assumption other frameworks don’t have their own hacky behavior, or other frameworks are worse.

This is not necessarily warranted. Modern PHP is faster than Ruby in many benchmarks; and Rails is still running GitHub and Shopify. Square uses Laravel in a backend serving 100M+ requests per day, with no plans to rewrite. To compare it to a Steam engine and Coal; that’s unfair stereotyping.

On that note, JavaScript’s amount of churn could be an entire discussion by itself. I’ll take some quirky behavior that just keeps working over mindless churn any day.

What did you end up going with if not PHP/Laravel?

Dotnet for backend and SvelteKit for frontend.

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