[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.