Key Takeaways
PHP 8.x is genuinely fast. JIT compilation brought real-world performance improvements that close the gap with languages that were previously clearly faster. Benchmarks against Node.js in web workloads show competitive results.
Laravel and Symfony cut development time in ways that matter commercially. The ecosystem is mature enough that most standard application patterns are solved problems with tested implementations.
The talent pool is enormous and global. PHP developers are available at every price point. For companies where development cost is a constraint, this is a real factor.
PHP’s web-native design still matters. The request/response lifecycle that PHP was built around maps directly to how web applications actually work. Languages designed for general computation sometimes fight this model.
