Wow.

> You're talking about PHP6 like it's a thing (spoiler alert: it was never released)

Spoiler alert PHP 6 was a thing. Spoiler alert PHP 6 NOT being released was a blemish on PHP that made a lot of people say "we might not have a future here"... Python spent years going from 2 to 3 while PHP chugged through 4 and into 5. Python ripped the UNICODE bandaid off, the one that PHP could not... https://webcollab.sourceforge.io/unicode.html .

And yes MB strings work... I did a fair bit of I18N work back in the day. PHP string mishandling was in all the dark corners and odd bugs you had to dig out of a codebase. I made good money doing it, it was NOT fun...

>> Even Symfony 1 was here in 2005, and PHP 5.3 brang a complete revolution and growth of the entire ecosystem

No one gave a shit about symphony at the time unless you worked for a body shop. We all wanted to build on Zend, and for good reason. Zend server (the opt cache and debug tools) and corporate backing was one of the things that made a lot of companies comfortable with their PHP plunge. "Open source" was still rather novel coming out of the Y2k bubble, and managers were still old guard and wanted an "IBM" style name (to blame if the shit hit thee fan). There is a reason that magento chose to build on top of ZF. (SO much EAV ptsd).

It also became super common in this time to run a Drupal Or WP site for your marketing department. Slapping theses up was a no brainer, and to some degree still is. These tools a bit reason that PHP still has a massive footprint for such a large portion of the web.

> Go wasn't created to develop web-apps in the first place, it's a low-level network-related project

Umm NO.

> PHP has always been about creating web applications, and will always be

After the 6 debacle and unicode support this limitation is why a LOT of the best php dev's around moved to python, or ruby... Being able to easily reuse your tools in batch processors or cli script in an intuitive way was a boon. RabbitMQ and Sidekiq were eye openers for a lot of early 2010's php devs that things were moving on, that the "pure web" was coming to an end. Yes Composer was a thing, but it seemed pale compared to PIP or Gems (and in a lot of ways still is)...

PHP being on every $10 a month hosting package gave it legs. The fact that it's still so web focused with modern dev is now a short coming... For as much as the langue evolved it needed to evolve here and didn't.

>> And honestly, FrankenPHP is an incredibly good combination of both worlds: brings all the scalability of Go, with the flexibility of Caddy ...

From the PHP side it's impressive. From the Go side less so... One of the joys of writing go is being able to deploy a single binary with ease. I can skip "containers" all together with a standard go program.

Frankenphp has directions to accomplish the same thing... using either a docker container (this should be a code smell), or a shell script. Have you read that shell script? If you have then wee both have the same questions (Oh boy does that thing need some comments). Make, Basel, Mage would be much more appropriate here, because that shell script is UGLY AF... but these would all be harder to get working "containerless".

Unless I missed the hook, that build process doesn't even run tests first...

This is the thing with go. Can I run the tests, Can I build, is the build painful, is there a reason for it being "non standard" (the CGO qualifies here) ... is the build process sane (this one needs a lot of work) ...