On: Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust

[adventured]

PHP 7 is extremely fast.

There was some legitimate criticism to be had about PHP 5.x being slow, especially if it wasn't paired with an opcode cache system / accelerator.

[EGreg → adventured]

PHP is fast, faster than Node.js even.

But in practice, the Node.js ecosystem is all built around evented I/O and PHP has to execute them one at a time.

(Well, actually with libraries like Kraken and ReactPHP and amp, you can have an event loop, but there are not that many I/O options for you.)