[berkes]

Several reasons:

* The bindings for making anything GUI-ish lack. Horribly. I doubt there is one application like an editor written in PHP; that is actually used. * Its long-threads are ... lacking; You cannot write anything deamon-ish in PHP. * Memory management, as Ramus puts it, is not a concern "I just restart Apache". That makes it unusable for anything bigger then a small CLI-tool. * The Cli-libraries are decent, but far from things like Ruby's Thor.

You can write CLI-tools just fine, but "general purpose" is much more then "Managing Web-Content And Some CLI tools".

[KorvinSzanto]

Check out Phabricator, it has daemons that are very well managed and cli tools that are fully featured. Arguing that it's unusable for something large is just wrong. The way you manage memory in PHP is the same you way you manage it in any other language; you write /good/ code.