PHP

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

How long have you been using PHP?

Cal Evans

PHP Community Contributor

PHP is nowhere near dead as it's been declared every year since 2005. It's a solid choice for a career and it's not going anywhere. Long live the ElePHPant and the PHP community!

Which versions of PHP do you regularly use?

2020202120222023
53%PHP 8.2
46%49%PHP 8.1
34%41%29%PHP 8.0
44%76%61%45%PHP 7.4
46%37%18%9%PHP 7.3
41%26%14%10%PHP 7.2
21%11%7%4%PHP 7.1
15%8%6%4%PHP 7.0
26%15%12%10%PHP 5.6 or older
1%0%0%1%Other
1%2%2%I'm not sure
0%76%

Which PHP development environments do you regularly use?

74%

Local

47%

Containerized

35%

Remote

7%

Virtualized

2%

Other

Most PHP developers remain loyal to local development environments. The majority of remote environment users use local ones, too.

How do you usually debug PHP code?

62%
63%

By dumping values

37%
35%

Using a debugger

1%
2%

Other

Which PHP frameworks and platforms do you regularly use?

61%

58%

Laravel

22%

21%

WordPress

21%

24%

Symfony

10%

9%

CodeIgniter

6%

7%

Yii

5%

5%

CakePHP

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Do you use any libraries or frameworks for asynchronous PHP?

79%
80%

I don’t use any

11%
10%

Swoole

7%
7%

ReactPHP

2%
1%

Amp

2%
3%

Other

How do you run your PHP applications in production?

70%

74%

Server, virtual machine

28%

25%

Shared hosting

14%

13%

Serverless

14%

13%

Platform as a service

6%

6%

I’m not sure

5%

4%

Other

Aaron Francis

Educator at @PlanetScale

I’m excited to see serverless PHP usage is growing, even if just by a tiny bit this year! PHP is so perfectly suited for the serverless model. I'm excited for what the future holds there.

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

59%

PhpStorm

30%

VS Code

3%

IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate with the PHP plugin

3%

Notepad++

2%

Sublime Text

3%

Other

Despite all the measures we’ve taken to secure a representative pool of respondents, these results may be slightly skewed toward users of JetBrains products, as they were more likely to take the survey.

Which testing frameworks do you regularly use?

54%

55%

PHPUnit

13%

6%

Pest

4%

5%

Codeception

3%

3%

Behat

1%

2%

PHPSpec

1%

1%

SimpleTest

Zuzana Kunckova

Founder of @larabellesPHP

I find it very interesting that 31% of developers don't write tests for PHP. This has gone down from 33% last year, but it's still one-third of respondents who don't write PHP tests. I guess they like to live life on the edge!

What additional quality tools do you regularly use?

30%

31%

PHP CS Fixer

23%

28%

PHP_CodeSniffer

26%

23%

PHPStan

13%

14%

Php Inspections ​

6%

8%

Psalm

7%

6%

PHP Insights

What template engines do you use?

45%

41%

Blade

22%

26%

Twig

8%

9%

Smarty

2%

3%

Mustache

1%

1%

Antlers

2%

1%

Latte

What tools do you use for profiling or measuring performance?

22%

Xdebug Profiler

21%

HTTP load testing

17%

In code timers

12%

Application performance monitoring

4%

Blackfire.io

3%

XHProf

2%

Other

45%

None

What are your top three PHP feature requests?

47%

Typed arrays

43%

Performance

32%

Generics

30%

Native async support

26%

Standardized core library functions

15%

Pattern matching

14%

Static class initialization

Thank you for your time!

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