
Chronicle Will Make You Question the Need for Blockchain Technology - CiPHPerCoder
https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-question-need-for-blockchain-technology
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smt88
You may (and obviously do) disagree, but there is no universe in which I would
use a security-essential product built with PHP.

It has to do with the lack of static types, the "flexible" (i.e. lax) syntax,
silent errors, and type coercion. But, even more than that, it has to do with
the practices of PHP's maintainers. I suspect HHVM is better, but I can't say
for sure.

Just one man's opinion, of course.

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
> It has to do with the lack of static types

We're using PHP 7, with declare(strict_types=1) everywhere.

> the "flexible" (i.e. lax) syntax, silent errors, and type coercion

We use return types with strict_types=1, and throw exceptions if something is
going wrong rather than proceeding with invalid state. If something was going
to return a falsy value where e.g. a string was expected, PHP will throw a
TypeError instead. [https://3v4l.org/8VR05](https://3v4l.org/8VR05)

> But, even more than that, it has to do with the practices of PHP's
> maintainers. I suspect HHVM is better, but I can't say for sure.

The release manager for PHP 7.2 is a former HHVM dev, who is very much about
correctness and maintainability.

It sounds like your opinion of PHP is based on circa 5.3 and earlier, but a
lot has improved in 7.0 and newer. I'd definitely recommend giving newer code
a second look.

[http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/php7/](http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/php7/)

[https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/02/cryptographically-
secure-...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/02/cryptographically-secure-php-
development)

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CiPHPerCoder
With apologies to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643488)

