Question

I was reading the article “PHP Sucks, But It Doesn’t Matter” by Jeff Atwood.

In the comments he writes:

That said, I absolutely think it’s important for PHP devs to be aware of the architectural limitations of PHP, and understand the alternatives.

What are those limitations and how do they compare with other scripting / weakly typed languages?

Also, what are the alternatives in those conditions where limitations need to be avoided?

Answer 1

There are basically two real limitations I see:

PHP is a fully synchronous language. This has impact on which things you can easily implement in PHP and which not. For example implementing a Long Polling driven chat application isn’t trivial, because PHP would need block one process per chatter. I’m not saying it’s impossible, you can hack around this limitation using some PHP Daemon library. I’m just saying that this is one of the cases where other languages, like JavaScript, are more appropriate (NodeJS).

PHP is slow. Please don’t understand this an an offense. It’s a fact that PHP – as implemented by Zend – is slow compared to other scripting languages. This typically is no problem when building websites, but you obviously can’t do certain things: Implementing a ray tracer in PHP is definitely a bad idea – whereas in JavaScript you could do this.

But apart from that, I think that PHP is pretty multi-purpose. You can use it for nearly anything – and I do 😉