It feels pretty off that Laravel and Symfony, arguably the two largest benefactories to PHP being in such a good position have donated so little. Those contribution values are lifetime, Laravel hasn&#x27;t funded it for over 3 years now, meanwhile its a multimillion dollar business with a huge amount of financial backing.I know its all donations and not expected, but them kicking in ~$30k a month would realistically be nothing to them, but benefit the PHP foundation massively. The same goes for Symfony.

Crazy that Automattic only makes 4,843,750 a year (and donates 8% to the PHP foundation).

Why does Laravel have a dude with a Hawaiian shirt, though? Heh

&gt;&gt;&gt; Last year, it received close to 680K USD, and managed this security audit, sponsored 10 developers, and paid for various expenses. For a language that runs close to 75% of the web, it certainly deserves more funding.Wow, Automattic itself donated more than half of it:
Silver Sponsor
$387,500 USDWhy many donors with more than USD 24K and USD 100K still listed as Silver sponsor?Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opencollective.com&#x2F;phpfoundation&#x2F;contribute&#x2F;major-sponsors-34207" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opencollective.com&#x2F;phpfoundation&#x2F;contribute&#x2F;major-sp...</a>

Huge shout-out to the PHP Foundation for this.Last year, it received close to 680K USD, and managed this security audit, sponsored 10 developers, and paid for various expenses. For a language that runs close to 75% of the web, it certainly deserves more funding.Some of the recent initiatives from the Foundation (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thephp.foundation&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;transparency-and-impact-report-2024&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thephp.foundation&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;transparency-and-i...</a>) :- All PHP versions now receive a total of 4 years of security updates; 2 bug fixes + 2 security, up from 3.- PIE: A replacement for PECL, to easily install PHP extensions (C, C++ compiled, not PHP packages).- The security audit.(I&#x27;m one of the PHP Core team and a volunteer at the foundation, happy to answer any questions, but almost all of the work is public)

I was under the impression that facebook would be more interested into PHP health since I thought they relied on it more. But it seems that my impression was outdated by a decade.

It&#x27;s also important to understand how all these are achieved with so little ($683k donated in 2024) Considering how much php code is out there the budget php foundation has at its disposal is very small. I wished more companies sponsored.

Mainly I want to say thank you. An incredible amount of work and dedication has gone into php over a very long period of time. The php community has managed to reinvent php several times, mainly just to make the language better. May they continue with their great success.

The real question would be why not ?Many of the quirks and problematic parts have been addressed through the years, it&#x27;s battle tested, and there is a healthy and stable ecosystem behind. It doesn&#x27;t need to be everyone&#x27;s first choice, but there&#x27;s also no strong reason to avoid using it in its current state.

&gt; The vast majority of projects will never have to scale to billions of users, so hyperscalability is not a huge concern.I would have thought PHP would scale very well. It may not be high performance, but its start each request-response cycle from scratch should scale horizontally very well, surely?

&gt; It has a low barrier to entry and great language features - static typing being one of the big ones... and it&#x27;s completely optional in many cases on top of that. Even if you&#x27;re using third party libraries, it will only crash if you mess up your types at the library&#x27;s interface.

Because it&#x27;s good enough for almost everything. The vast majority of projects will never have to scale to billions of users, so hyperscalability is not a huge concern.It has a low barrier to entry and great language features - static typing being one of the big ones. It has become a really nice language over the years, great to work in and in no way less satisfying or effective than for example golang.And, of course, laravel exists.

By the time a large C# solution finishes compiling, the PHP Dev already started another ticket and is pressing F5 to insta check if his code works so he can move to the third ticket of the day.

I worked at a company that had half C#, half PHP developers. The PHP developers ran circles around them both in building features, and in fixing vulnerabilities (I was hired for a reason, legacy code). I can always depend on a PHP developer to outrun anyone else.

PHP is better than any of its alternatives within its problem space.

It&#x27;s cheap, it&#x27;s fast, it&#x27;s simple, and it works everywhere.

It just works out of the box, and request-response model still fits the web better than any other solution out there.And it&#x27;s still performant enough <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;arvidkahl&#x2F;status&#x2F;1775261978006896730" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;arvidkahl&#x2F;status&#x2F;1775261978006896730</a>

That&#x27;s a great one. On of the things I really enjoy when using Rust.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rust-lang.org&#x2F;reference&#x2F;expressions&#x2F;match-expr.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.rust-lang.org&#x2F;reference&#x2F;expressions&#x2F;match-expr.h...</a>

If all the other reasons given here don&#x27;t convince you already, I have one more to offer: Match Expressions[1]![1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;php.watch&#x2F;versions&#x2F;8.0&#x2F;match-expression" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;php.watch&#x2F;versions&#x2F;8.0&#x2F;match-expression</a>

I would hope so considering they’re literally a casino…

Laravel. My previous employer was using it for casino&#x2F;sportsbook websites and they were able to scale so much with Laravel micro services.(They had hundreds of millions of profit)

&gt; Your dad&#x27;s PHP is no longer the current PHP.I am pretty much in the &quot;your dad&quot; category here. Where best to start learning how PHP has changed since I used it?There are things that appeal to be about PHP.

TL;DR Your dad&#x27;s PHP is no longer the current PHP. The language itself has been thoroughly modernized, made more consistent, bug free and performant. There is nothing better than a piece of software that keeps getting improved decade after decade borne out of real developer needs and experience.- Type annotations are integrated and work well with PHP now. This results in a kind of scripty Java OOP that is more succinct and type checked ! (it is possible to write PHP without types when you want metaprogramming features also)- Many inconsistencies in the design of the language (OOP, function naming etc.) have been resolved&#x2F;smoothed out- The language recognises the inherent problems with `null` and allows you to make type annotations that rule out null. This is my smell test for a language BTW -- golang for instance does not seem to have a good story for null.- PHP Language developers have been really good about increasing performance year after year- Lots of software like web frameworks and CMSes continue to be based on PHPAnd -- the greatest part of the design -- PHP remains the best example of the &quot;shared nothing&quot; architecture. An architecture that allows you to scale your application easily.

Yep, nuclear batteries. Laravel and the whole PHP ecosystem is just so much ahead of any other programming language when it comes to building websites and APIs it&#x27;s insane.

It just works and has batteries included.

in a world where many projects are started with Python and Ruby, PHP has definitely a bright spot.

The language has its quirks, but frameworks like Laravel make application &#x2F; API development very easy. And, of course, it runs practically anywhere :)

But how do you install dependencies? Is the &quot;it&quot; you&#x27;re scping a folder structure that includes them?

As mentioned by others, PHP today is not the PHP that is still in most peoples heads. 
For me one of the big advantages is ease of deployment.
No docker, no images, no overhead, scp it to any toaster running apache and you are done!

Because I‘m good in it. And my clients don‘t depend on me - they can choose to continue working with me not because I‘m the only one who knows how the language works, but because they WANT to.

Did you use any plain PHP or any framework?

I legit started a new customer project (simple business website) on PHP a cple days ago:The reason is simple: It&#x27;s to me the most efficient, best performant SSR option out there, if your requirements are simple.You will be amazed at the website&#x27;s speed. We are so used to the lethargic JS slop of the average website out there these days.I love PHP, I believe future &quot;vibe coders&quot; will be left bedazzled at its powers, which will be beyond their comprehension.

While this is true, I would say that your advice only applies if you have experience with other web frameworks from other languages. If you’re coming at it blind to any sort of web development, the features afforded to you by a web framework are really useful and helpful to understand.For example, imagine someone who had never really thought about routing in a definitions file versus file based versus annotations. Three valid use cases that might not exist if if you have a background in something like hardware or if you come from a non-programming discipline.If you do have that experience, you can rebuild almost any affordance in PHP at this point and it purely comes down to personal preference and how you like to write and design with code.

it&#x27;s pretty nice now, you don&#x27;t even need a framework

I am genuinely interested why anyone would start a new project in PHP currently. What are the reasons?

PHP Core Security Audit Results