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It's coordination problems and large scale distributed action, not some moral character of how serious the people are. Effort is not fungible. To make php good, you only have to act at one point, in a localized way, at the php foundation. To ditch php, you have to act in a coordinated way across any resource strapped companies and individuals. Just see how hard it was to ditch Python 2 or how ipv4 is still not ditched.

Trying to understand underlying reasons and incentive structures is much more productive and useful than simply venting about the worse moral character and seriousness of people in one industry vs the next. Curiously, the grass seems always greener - when you ask people in other industries, you'll often hear endless complaints about the state of things there too.

It's a market thing too. Company A tries to write perfect code. Company B tries to write something that the users don't hate. Company B wins in the vast majority of cases. Especially when company A these days is stuck with a huge space to investigate.

This isn't unique to coding, but coding has been built on it for decades, with the "safety valve" of "who has the time to check all that?". So defcon speakers and intelligence agencies burn time investigating for weak links that might take months to find, and the rest of the world churns on.

Now you have companies throwing thousands or millions in compute at problems just checking EVERY possible problem and yeeeeup, looks like there's a lot of "good enough, ship it" which is now a major problem for all those companies using that tech.

It's still going to be interesting to see how this develops because, yes, there's a lot of code being written by people who haven't even read it (although the amount of enterprise production level code I've seen that's bad stack overflow copy paste makes me less worried about this), and there's maybe better tools and standards to catch these things (why not spin up a test suite if it's an afternoon of AI poking rather hiring a dev and getting them up to speed?).

There's a PHP implementation written in Rust.
This is incredibly interesting. Thanks for mentioning it. Unfortunately it’s not yet ready:

https://phprust.com/status/

I’ll keep checking

It runs everything that any software I've ever written needs - and I've been doing PHP since dates began with `19`.
But since php isn’t complied, how would I know if something is broken until every code path is exercised? Genuine question
You exercise every code path with a unit or integration test.

I tend to write integration tests for the paths users take through the application (website), and fill in the holes with unit tests. I'll also write unit tests for methods that change often or are critical, such as business logic.

I wonder if PHP compiled with Fil-C would have stopped that bug. My guess is it would have.
My tests show that it would. The post-patch integration tests trap under Fil-C, and the StealMyBitcoin exploit chain traps too.

https://mbrock.github.io/filnix/docs/php.html

It’s also compatible with most PHP native extensions.