honestly i haven't looked at laravel recently enough to remember the specifics (although others here seem to have), but 2 general stengths are (1) ruby is more consistent, intuitive and fun vs. php, and (2) rails has reasonable defaults, easy configurability on top of that, and a nice ecosystem of both built-in and community-built widgets. it's so fast to get up and running with rails.
but i'd pick php over js any day! (probably even over python/django, unless data mining is a core concern)
Which part do you see that is not performance in that benchmark which shown the average time? I have tried benchmark on my own and PHP took longer than RubyJIT.
Command being timed: "/usr/local/bin/ruby --jit -W0 nbody.rb 50000000"
User time (seconds): 249.30
System time (seconds): 0.58
Percent of CPU this job got: 100%
Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 4:08.97
---
PHP 7.3.11 (cli) (built: Oct 24 2019 11:29:52) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.3.11, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v7.3.11, Copyright (c) 1999-2018, by Zend Technologies
gtime -v php -n nbody.php 50000000
-0.169075164
-0.169059907
Command being timed: "php -n nbody.php 50000000"
User time (seconds): 248.02
System time (seconds): 0.49
Percent of CPU this job got: 99%
Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 4:09.82
Polish and refinement. Ruby's expressiveness and clean design make possible a level of elegance in Rails that I haven't seen in any other web framework. Ruby lends itself to DSLs much more than most other languages, Clojure excepted, and its meta-programming makes possible a number of shortcuts which help you to get a project up and running in record time. Add to that the magnitude of commits to the Rails project over its 14-year history and you have an ideal tool for SME web projects.
but i'd pick php over js any day! (probably even over python/django, unless data mining is a core concern)