> PHP is a nice language but is having trouble keeping up with modern languages<p>It's only "having trouble" because it can't change its API from month to month to match whatever's in vogue. A majority of the web still runs on some variant of PHP, and that guarantees that it's not dying anytime soon.<p>More broadly, it seems the author wants to create a version of PHP that's not focussed on web requests, which is sort of the entire point of PHP.
A perfect example of error handling in go in the wild:<p><a href="https://github.com/MagicalTux/goro/blob/3cb3dfe0eef910c03e415e68ca29d7928c14e68a/core/compile-for.go#L117-L152" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/MagicalTux/goro/blob/3cb3dfe0eef910c03e41...</a><p>More php interpreters is of course nice.
<i>"Better caching of compiled code by allowing sharing of compiled or live objects (classes, objects, etc) between running PHP scripts"</i><p>I'm a little confused on this piece, as PHP does have a cross process opcache. People also use things like apcu to share userspace things across processes (uses mmap).
For C#, checkout PeachPie which allows you to run PHP applications on .NET Core including WordPress - <a href="https://www.peachpie.io/2017/02/wordpress-announcement.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.peachpie.io/2017/02/wordpress-announcement.html</a>
> PHP is having trouble keeping up with modern language<p>which are these modern languages and which are the cases where it is not keeping up?<p>IMO PHP is one of the languages where development is really quick and the ecosystem is flourishing.
I don't like unnecessary layers. Interpreted languages waste silicon and energy. I've heard startups justify using Ruby or PHP by saying "servers are cheap", which is just a bad engineering mindset.<p>Instead of building PHP apps on a PHP platform built in Go, people should just build apps in Go. Or in C++, D, Nim, F#, C#, or even Java 8 or 10 with that new AOT compiler. (I think F# and C# can also be compiled in advance with CoreRT, but even if they can't, they're a huge upgrade over any interpreted language.)<p>I would mention Rust except that it's terrible. All popular programming languages in our timeline are bad, and deter millions of smart people from the profession. But Rust is extraordinarily bad and should be replaced.