I know that Lemmy is open source and it can only get better from here on out, but I do wonder if any experts can weigh in whether the foundation is well written? Or are we building on top of 4 years worth of tech debt?
PHP is really old isn’t it? I remember using phpBB forums some twenty years ago. They worked really well, but that’s going pretty far back.
PHP is an interpreted language which is inherently slow compared to a compiled language, such as Rust which is very fast. Modern PHP isn’t so bad kinda but I’m guessing a guy who hates programming and decided to start a new PHP project in 2023 isn’t really optimizing anything. Also, you’ll never get anyone you help you write PHP because gross. It’s a dead language with a small community of masochists and maintainers of legacy projects.
It would be like if you saw someone building a fighter jet and thought “hey, I can do better!” and then started getting your paper mache out to start playing air plane designer.
It is, but it aged pretty well.
Devs wanted to store state in objects, so it became object-oriented. It also gained a really solid full-fledged web framework with a strong community, with Symfony; and some strong micro-frameworks like Laravel.
But it will always be interpreted and mono-threaded, and therefore never a good choice for high-scale solutions. Facebook has to invent a brand new language (Hack) and runtime (HHVM) that was close enough to PHP so they could spend millions spending their PHP codebase to it, in order to make it compiled and multi-threaded, and make it scale.
