77.5% of the world’s websites are using “the best language in the world” PHP!

Organize | Jung Ryeo Won

Produced | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)

27 years ago today, June 8, 1995, when Rasmus Lerdorf publicly released PHP, he must not have imagined that a programming language originally created to maintain his personal web pages would be so “world famous”.

“PHP is the best web development language in the world”, “PHP is the best language ever, no one” – programmers with a little more seniority may know these two sentences: the official PHP document of the year These two “big words” have attracted irony and controversy from countless developers.

Today, “PHP is the best language in the world” has become a stalk in the programmer circle, and PHP has almost become the lowest existence in the chain of programming language contempt. But in fact, is PHP really so unpopular?

Recently, W3Techs released a statistical report on the use of PHP on websites, and the results showed: “77.5% of all websites for which we know the server-side programming language are using PHP.”

The proportion is gradually decreasing, but still ranks first

Although today’s PHP is often ridiculed by programmers, it is necessary to know that the earliest official statement of PHP was in 2001, that is, the era of PC Internet – in that era, PHP was indeed worthy of ” The World’s Best Web Development Language”.

Using PHP to develop a web system not only has a short cycle, high stability, strong scalability, but also does not separate the front and back ends of the website, and its design is also very suitable for the development environment of the web system, which is easy to bring developers a smooth and convenient development experience, so It has been favored by quite a few programmers.

However, with the subsequent rise of the mobile Internet, the development of mobile apps has exploded, the front and back ends have gradually separated, and the status of web development has been affected to a certain extent. In recent years, people have shifted their focus to Java, Python and other languages ​​with more application scenarios. .

However, data provided by W3Techs shows that while PHP’s market share has declined due to the rise of these programming languages, it remains the undisputed number one overall in what it does best in web development.

It’s not hard to understand: PHP, which has been in existence for more than 20 years, is fast, free, and open source, and these features are undoubtedly the best solution for many startups that value time and cost the most. Not only that, among more than 70% of the websites in the world that still use PHP as the main development language, there are many internationally famous popular websites: Facebook, 360, Wikipedia, Sina, Instagram, etc.

Although Python, Go and other languages ​​have received a lot of attention in recent years due to the rapid development of big data and artificial intelligence, both big data and artificial intelligence technologies are still in the early stages of development; and although PHP has a relatively single application scenario, the main It is applied in the field of web development, but the production and implementation of these technologies in the future will still involve a lot of web development, so at least in the short term PHP will not be “cool”.

PHP 7 usage is much higher than PHP 8

Not only that, but the official PHP development team has also continued to maintain and iterate new versions over the years. In 2020, PHP 8 was also newly released, which supports the JIT compiler and has improved performance by up to 3 times.

To this end, W3Techs also counted the proportion of websites using various PHP versions: although the PHP development team released PHP 8 in 2020, as the latest major version, its usage rate is far less than that of PHP 7 (71.6%) and PHP 5 (24.5%), and only 3.6% of websites are using PHP 8 for development.

The reason may be that, on the one hand, PHP 7, which was released as early as October 2015, has accumulated a wide range of applications over the years. On the other hand, it may be that Microsoft announced that starting from PHP 8, it will no longer provide official support on Windows. – In other words, Microsoft has supported PHP on Windows since Vista, and PHP 7.4 has become Microsoft’s last official PHP version.

According to Microsoft’s maintenance cycle arrangement for PHP on Windows, PHP 7.2 has terminated its security repair support in November 2020, and the security repair phase of PHP 7.3 only lasted until November last year. The deferred support for PHP 7.4 is also coming in 2022. Ends November 28, 2019, after which Microsoft will no longer support PHP for Windows in any form.

However, in general, Microsoft Windows announced that it will give up support for PHP, which has little impact on most developers, because if the official does not do it, it does not mean that the community will not pick it up and do it by itself. The PHP community behind it is still insisting on maintaining it. The developer is also using a Linux system.

The text and pictures in this article are from CSDN