[gjmacd]

I would argue that Facebook's work had little impact on the "scalability" of PHP. I don't see people adopting HipHop (HHVM) in huge numbers. The problem with PHP was it's standards body wasn't doing a good job of keeping the language consistent and it lacked a package manager where Ruby, Python and Node all had solid standards bodies and it was driven by having package management.

With Composer that changed and it appears now they are doing a much better job of standards and changes to the language.

With that said, it's not a concurrent system. It's blocking and that's a problem for modern Web languages.

I do think PHP growth is on the way down... but slowly.

[no1youknowz]

Actually HHVM had a huge impact. Having competition is always a good thing. It forced the devs to go into overdrive and improve the product.

What came out of it was PHP 7 and the gap closed significantly. There were even rumblings about a PHP JIT complier. So I would say the impact was a good one.

As for PHP growth, what's there to replace it? Golang, Exlir, Node, Crystal, Ruby, Python? They all have their own pros and cons.

With laravel being a great framework and much easier for developers to use rather than symfony. I would say the future of PHP has never looked better.

[yehosef]

>it's not a concurrent system. It's blocking and that's a problem for modern Web languages.

PHP has had async for a while (https://reactphp.org/) and more recently an extension (https://www.swoole.co.uk/) had brought PHP async to equal or better performance to NodeJS (https://gist.github.com/nkt/e49289321c744155484c)

I recently started working with NodeJS more intensively (heavy lifting for dozens of microservices for complex app/data). While there are many nice features NodeJS has, most people don't understand what PHP can do. In my opinion PHP is superior for many backend application and the "snob factor" is one of the reasons it's not more known beyond wordpress.

[x0x0]

Even if most people don't use HHVM, I claim it increases use because it allays fears about what happens if your project / company does need scale.