PHP

These questions were shown only to the developers who chose PHP as one of their three primary programming languages.

Share of PHP as a primary programming language by country

37%31%28%24%22%21%19%FranceMexicoSpainArgentinaJapanGermanyBrazil
All results

Developers from France are very active members of PHP community. More than a third of French respondents are PHP users.

Which version of PHP do you regularly use?

2020
2019
44%/ -46%/23%41%/35%21%/17%15%/10%22%/11% 5%/4% 1%/0%PHP 7.4PHP 7.3PHP 7.2PHP 7.1PHP 7.0PHP 5.6PHP 5.5 or olderOther

The share of PHP 7.4 grew very quickly throughout the year, increasing to 44%. Meanwhile, the share of PHP 7.3 has doubled, rising from 23% to 46% since last year.

Which PHP development environments do you regularly use?

72%
Local
45%
Containerized (Docker, Rocket)
42%
Remote (SFTP, SSH, Remote desktop, etc.)
18%
Virtualized (Vagrant, Otto, etc.)
1%
Other

The popularity of containerized environments is increasing. Almost half of PHP developers (45%) use containers for development, which is 6 percentage points higher than in 2019.

How do you usually debug PHP code?

65%Using PHP functions(var_dump(), die(), dd(),dump(), etc.)
35%Using a debugger(Xdebug, Zend Debugger,phpdbg)
1%Other

Which PHP frameworks and platforms do you regularly use, if any?

50%24%22%12% 9% 7% 6%LaravelSymfonyWordPressCodeIgniterYiiCakePHPSlim
All results

Roughly half of the developers we surveyed use Laravel, which makes it one of the 3 most popular platforms, along with Symfony and WordPress.

How do you run your PHP applications in production?

58%23%23% 7% 4% 2%php-fpmmod_phpI have no ideaServerless (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, GCP Functions, etc.)Other process manager (RoadRunner, php-pm, etc.)Other

Which editor or IDE do you mostly use for PHP development?

59%21% 6% 4% 3% 2% 2% 1% 1% 1%PhpStormVS CodeSublime TextIntelliJ IDEA Ultimate with PHP pluginAtomNetBeans IDEVimNotepad++Eclipse PDTOther

What additional quality tools do you use regularly, if any?

27%22%12%11% 9% 4% 3% 2% 2%56%PHP_CodeSnifferPHP CS FixerPhp Inspections ​(EA Extended)PHPStanPHPMDPHP InsightsPsalmPhanOtherNone

What tools for profiling or measuring performance do you use?

22%21%16%12% 7% 6% 2%45%Xdebug ProfilerHTTP load testing (ab, siege, etc.)In code timers (Manual timestamps, PHPBench, Toolbars, etc.)Application performance monitoring (New Relic, Tideways, etc.)Blackfire.ioXHProfOtherNone

Relative to the overall developer population, PHP users are more frequently involved in Deployment (48% vs. 38%) and System Administration (30% vs. 18%).

Which testing frameworks do you regularly use?

50%36%11% 7%PHPUnitI don’t write tests for PHPI write tests, but don’t use any frameworksCodeception
All results

What template engines do you use?

33%33%27%10%BladeNone, I use pure PHPTwigSmarty
All results

Do you use any libraries or frameworks for asynchronous PHP?

84%
I don’t use any
7%
Swoole
7%
ReactPHP
2%
Amp
1%
Other

Only 16% of the PHP developers surveyed use asynchronous frameworks or libraries. Swoole and ReactPHP, each with 7%, are the most commonly used.

What PHP feature do you miss the most?

32%19%18%10% 8% 6% 4% 3%Asynchronous featuresCleaner standard library under the \php namespaceGenericsScalar objects (calling methods on strings/arrays)Immutable types / Read-only class propertiesEnumsAnnotationsOther

Although asynchronous frameworks or libraries are used by only a small portion of the PHP community, introducing asynchronous features into the PHP core appeared to be the most desirable feature.

How would you prefer for PHP to evolve?

40%25%19%14% 2%More language cleanup and inconsistency fixesMore language stability, less backward-compatibility breaksI'm not sureMore options like strict_types to support bothOther

“The survey shows that the community holds diametrically opposed views on how PHP should evolve: for some, it is evolving too quickly, for others too slowly. This affirms my belief that the ‘Language Evolution RFC’ is important. I think that PHP evolves in the right direction. It sure could evolve faster, but I believe it’s fast enough. We just need to find the right approach for not leaving too many developers behind on old versions.”

Sebastian Bergmann

Creator of PHPUnit,
Co-Founder of thePHP.cc


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