A Case Against PHP

Given the latest miserable failure of the whole PHP ecosystem, the question remains whether it is not better to just abandon anything even remotely relying on this rather strange programming language.

In our case we realized that on more than half of our servers we can simly remove any CGI, CLI and mod_php packages and just completely ditch any support for PHP.

That was the easy part. However, as expected, there were a few legacy systems which still require PHP 5.x to run. And therefore we had to manually patch those to make them secure again. We managed to get our whole network clear of any problems related to this Charlie Foxtrot level failure.

The interesting part is how this could have been under the radar for almost 20 years spanning three major versions of the PHP interpreter. Did really no-one know? We will probably never learn, yet one thing is clear. A language without a good formal definition, specified only by its sole implementation, is not and never will be a good language to adopt for anything serious. That is still a case against Rust - hopefully the authors will improve the situation or Rust will be just another PHP.

This was a short one, but what can you say - we have been busy patching our systems. Tune in next time for something more substantial!