[geon]

Ruby and python aren't exactly known to be fast.

In my experience php is fast enough until you start generating lots of garbage. It seems it wasn't really designed to garbage collect at all, but to rely on the per-request cleanup.

[cyphar]

> until you start generating lots of garbage

We should really stop pretending that the garbage collector is the problem with langauges. The collector isn't the problem, your garbage is the problem.

[Not that I'm a proponent of PHP, though it does make popping shells far more fun.]

[geon]

The code becomes kind of weird when you have to second guess the language.

Now, the approach PHP takes is fine for the original vision of the language. It even works great.

But languages designed for long running processes often have some sort of mechanism for dealing with that situation explicitly. Like the `NSAutoreleasePool` in Objective C. In C++ you might build your own custom slab allocator.

I'd say the garbage collector is one of the problems with PHP. Then again, if you run into it, PHP might not be the right tool for that particular job.