[mirashii]

Citation needed.

The reality is almost certainly far simpler. PHP started as a suite of tools for writing CGI pages [1], which have the same property mentioned. As with many things, that early design choice has followed through and led to continuing to execute PHP in similar ways as CGI did way back then.

[1] http://php.net/manual/en/history.php.php

[mgkimsal]

> Citation needed.

I think the 'rll' user is Rasmus, who started PHP. I think he would be the best person to cite re: intentionality.

[kissgyorgy]

This is why I read HN every single day. This comment is epic :D

[k__]

It's also funny that the article mentions the evil subscribers in Node.js.

The fact that PHP died after every request made everything other than the HTTP use-case quiet a pain to implement.

That's one reason why it got pwnd by Node.js, I think.

[codedokode]

You can write a server that will handle multiple requests in PHP, for example, using ReactPHP.

By the way, I don't like how they implemented promises and asynchronous file streams: they copied them from Node.JS and didn't implement proper error reporting (which Node did't have at the time too if I remember correctly). For example, if there is a promise that was rejected and the rejection is not handled, there will be no exception thrown. So the developer won't even know about an error, even if it is a syntax error. That's how poorly Javascript promises were designed. Now this is fixed in JS and unhandled rejection will produce a warning in the console but there are many other bad things about them.

[k__]

I know, I wrote such a server in 2010, it just wasn't as nice as with Node, hehe