IMO part of this is because Laravel isn’t async. Which means it’s incredibly inefficient. There’s a reason why JavaScript has an event loop & Go has goroutines.
Laravel devs work around this by spinning up more instances, using Go for high traffic endpoints or autoscaling the number of queue workers through the roof. JS & Go devs don’t have to do any of that.
People get defensive when PHP is called “slow”. But any framework that needs 1 worker for every incoming request / job IS slow. Spin up a Laravel app with 4 Octane workers, hit it with 20 concurrent 5 second streaming requests and see what happens. It’s not pretty.
There are non-blocking PHP frameworks like AMPHP, Hyperf & Hypervel but Laravel has the mind share and the funding. Refactoring the framework to use an event loop (like Revolt) or Swoole and showing off performance that’s competitive with JS would make a big difference to adoption.
I think we, as Laravel/PHP community, have a problem.
I don't see many new/young devs starting with Laravel.
I also heard the same topic expressed by Taylor, Jeffrey, Nuno in podcasts.
Question: what can I/we do to promote PHP/Laravel to outsiders?
Let's brainstorm.