I get these arguments, and I still wouldn’t say it’s a “no brainer”. (_Node-brainer?_ :V) Having mostly worked in PHP, I’m certainly biased, and also I’ve been heavily working in Node for the past year.
Node does seem to have better performance - I’d be curious to see some comparisons with some of the newer (PHP 8 I think) performance enhancements that probably aren’t used in benchmarks, like JIT. That said, in my experience, both perform well enough for the majority of what you’re going to do on a day-to-day basis. If you really need to crunch lots of concurrent connections and heavy data loads, maybe you’d go with Node? Although there’s probably something better than either of those for that job.
PHP’s package ecosystem is certainly high quality, again from my anecdotal experience. Composer et al have done a lot of really good things where PEAR fell far short.
I also know that this is mostly a “me” issue with not being a Node backend person from the start, but my goodness there’s a lot to do to dive into an imported method and actually figure out what’s happening. Having to sift through bundled JS to trace back to the root of something is a lot more difficult than just seeing the raw PHP of a Composer package.
To each their own, and the right tool for the job - to say one tech is always better or preferred over another seems a little narrow for my personal taste.
Node does seem to have better performance - I’d be curious to see some comparisons with some of the newer (PHP 8 I think) performance enhancements that probably aren’t used in benchmarks, like JIT. That said, in my experience, both perform well enough for the majority of what you’re going to do on a day-to-day basis. If you really need to crunch lots of concurrent connections and heavy data loads, maybe you’d go with Node? Although there’s probably something better than either of those for that job.
PHP’s package ecosystem is certainly high quality, again from my anecdotal experience. Composer et al have done a lot of really good things where PEAR fell far short.
I also know that this is mostly a “me” issue with not being a Node backend person from the start, but my goodness there’s a lot to do to dive into an imported method and actually figure out what’s happening. Having to sift through bundled JS to trace back to the root of something is a lot more difficult than just seeing the raw PHP of a Composer package.
To each their own, and the right tool for the job - to say one tech is always better or preferred over another seems a little narrow for my personal taste.