LWN: Comments on "Microsoft drops support for PHP"

Microsoft drops support for PHP

anselm — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 13:35:07 +0000

Perl is great if you cut your teeth on Unix in the 1980s, and know C, the shell, and the standard command-line toolkit, because it leverages your experience with all of these. Perl is not so great if you don't have that kind of background, or if you can't let go of the preconceived notions that some non-Perl programming languages saddle you with, because then it just becomes a weird, illogical-seeming cauldron of special-character soup.

I'm saying this with a certain amount of affection as my masters' thesis involved writing (and documenting) a fairly large Perl program (notably Perl 4, as Perl 5 wasn't a thing at the time), and afterwards I spent part of my professional life teaching people Perl. These days I don't use Perl very much, though.

Microsoft drops support for PHP

remexre — Sun, 19 Jul 2020 23:40:43 +0000

I learned Perl in 2020, and it's actually great in the niche of a scripting language. It's definitely got some things that are unexpected coming from other languages (e.g. scalar vs list context), but I'd much rather maintain a Perl script of a few hundred lines than a bash script with equivalent functionality.

Microsoft drops support for PHP

balkanboy — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 05:53:55 +0000

PHP, like Perl, should probably have never existed...

Microsoft drops support for PHP

bferrell — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 02:18:36 +0000

I wonder if this has anything to do with the Activestate subscription model that went happened in 2019

Microsoft drops support for PHP

ceplm — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 20:09:53 +0000

> Redhat developers don't use RedHat on their desktop.

That’s actually more complicated. Many do, because it is the best way how to test the distro. I used to use even pre-Alpha releases of RHEL, and I have to admit it was even wilder experience than Rawhide … there were days sometime, when it actually even booted.

Microsoft drops support for PHP

rahulsundaram — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 18:24:22 +0000

> Apologies for the blanket statement; I hope the relevant "message" was understandable anyway.

No worries. If I am reading you right, the message is that enterprise editions have long term stability requirements which may conflict with the requirement to have much more recent versions for development. There are ways around this including dev toolset

https://developers.redhat.com/products/developertoolset/o...

The desktop components themselves are pretty often rebased including GNOME, Firefox etc so you can kinda eat your cake and have it too.

Microsoft drops support for PHP

marcH — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 17:29:39 +0000

Apologies for the blanket statement; I hope the relevant "message" was understandable anyway.

I bet many use multiple versions concurrently; I certainly use more than one Linux system/distro regularly :-) Which is in fact the easiest way to get a feel for these compatibility issues...

Microsoft drops support for PHP

rahulsundaram — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 17:18:02 +0000

>For active development not held back by ancient versions this would be Fedora then. Redhat developers don't use RedHat on their desktop.

As a blanket statement, this isn't correct. Some do, some don't

Microsoft drops support for PHP

Wol — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 14:40:41 +0000

This is exactly the problem I tried to solve with the LSB. Unfortunately they were trying to come at it from completely the opposite direction.

They were busy defining a system whereby the distro could say "I am providing X, Y and Z". I wanted a system whereby the app could tell the package manager "I require A, B and C". From the end user's point of view I would have thought my version was much better, we don't really care about the OS, what matters is the apps we want to run on top of it.

Cheers,
Wol

Microsoft drops support for PHP

marcH — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:54:55 +0000

For active development not held back by ancient versions this would be Fedora then. Redhat developers don't use RedHat on their desktop.

But then you don't get the same level of support and your closed source apps may break every year. Actually they don't because... they're not even available for Fedora, they're only available for SUSE.

Just go and compare the instructions for Linux versus the ones for Windows or Mac:
https://subsurface-divelog.org/download/

Microsoft drops support for PHP

ceplm — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 10:49:08 +0000

> OK but then which Linux distribution should they use?

Any? But practically, I would say, Debian if you don’t care about support, and RHEL/SUSE if you do?

Microsoft drops support for PHP

jkingweb — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 03:10:04 +0000

For years my PHP programming environment was a native Windows one. It caused some problems, but it mostly worked very well once set up. Getting it all set up was not a trivial task, though.

If this eventually leads to the end of support for PHP on Windows I will be quite sad, though not directly affected since I no longer use Windows. I wonder, though, if this might not lead to the opposite outcome: someone taking a hard look at how PHP is packaged for Windows and sanding off some of its many rough edges.

Microsoft drops support for PHP

ibukanov — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 06:49:46 +0000

Note that WSL2 is a virtual machine. Microsoft gave up addressing a slow file IO with WSL1. Linux kernel running in a VM still accesses files way faster than Windows kernel. Plus supporting all system calls that modern Linux applications use in WSL1 was problematic.

Microsoft drops support for PHP

marcH — Sun, 12 Jul 2020 19:53:22 +0000

> > Then why bother with WSL and Windows in the first place?

OK but then which Linux distribution should they use?

> You might be a Linux user and developer in your spare time but have to use Windows at work.

Besides the usual expertise and "tradition"/inertia, the dead simple reason companies stick to Windows is the same consumers stick to Android or iOS: closed-source apps (not the least remote management apps) and stable ABIs. Sorry for stating the obvious but someone asked.

Ironically, "DLL Hell" is worse on Linux, that's what has been holding back the Year of The Linux Desktop so much. Try running a binary from one distro on another or from one release to the next. It works... sometimes. Windows is actually just one product versioned and validated the same for everyone in the world and as everyone knows it's very big on backward compatibility. There are too many Linux distros to choose from and a number of them (most?) don't even care about binary compatibility and closed source - an admittedly complex issue because of C/C++ ABIs.

Cygwin and WSL remove the inconveniences of virtual machines: performance, "desktop on desktop" UI, file and network sharing,.... WSL makes the approach officially supported at last so that's why it's so popular. Granted, you still have to choose a distro but thanks to WSL you've now reduced your Linux requirements to a handful of mostly open-source apps. Best of both worlds combined.

Microsoft drops support for PHP

iteratedlateralus — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 23:31:56 +0000

I've worked at two places where they ran the unorthodox setup of having PHP running on a Windows server. It's definitely an awkward setup.

Microsoft drops support for PHP

clump — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 13:20:16 +0000

Forgive me, I meant "Cygwin".

Microsoft drops support for PHP

clump — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 13:18:58 +0000

Many people have restrictive devices provided by their employers. You might be a Linux user and developer in your spare time but have to use Windows at work. WSL (and Cygnet before it) could make the best of the situation.

Microsoft drops support for PHP

jem — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 13:13:23 +0000

Then why bother with WSL and Windows in the first place?

Microsoft drops support for PHP

ibukanov — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 13:00:11 +0000

Indeed. Ubuntu for WSL is just few clicks away and with coming support for Linux GUI apps there is little reason to bother with PHP builds for Windows.

Microsoft drops support for PHP

b3nt0box — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 12:18:40 +0000

I think there is also a way to run php in .net core...which isn't my thing, but hey...

Microsoft drops support for PHP

tomica — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 06:41:02 +0000

I really doubt that anyone uses PHP on Windows in production anymore, especially not the new releases of PHP. My impression is that those days are long gone. Even their own stack can appear unmaintained (IIS side). For development purposes one can easily use WSL.

Microsoft drops support for PHP

flussence — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 04:25:07 +0000

No need for concern here, it's just a return to the old status quo. PHP's popularity first exploded _in spite of_ Microsoft trying to upsell users into its IIS and ASP monoculture, largely thanks to a cottage industry of people making one-click win32 installers that bundled it with something more capable (Apache2). Nowadays there are entire community-maintained OS package managers for windows, so I imagine PHP can just live in those.