[diggan]

One thing that I think is under-appreciated from the perspective of "getting shit done" is that the default model of PHP makes it really hard to have memory leaks that eventually crashes your app/server, as your PHP script has a defined "start" and "end" that are all within the request lifecycle.

So even if you leak horribly, thanks to Apache/Nginx/Caddy/whatever only launching your script and then your script stops running, it basically doesn't affect you at all.

Granted, this is more like a bandage, but it works out great for beginners who just want to create their own personal dynamic homepages, something PHP does great :)

Compared to Python or JS where the standard practice is creating a server that runs constantly, and if you leak memory somewhere, your application eventually crashes as you run out of memory.

[cwillu]

Basically, PHP was using arenas before arenas were cool :)