Comment on Nextcloud (PHP) vs OpenCloud (Rust)
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 4 months ago-
PHP doesn’t have a built in web server because it doesn’t need one, makes development a whole lot easier as each page is it’s independent process. No worries about memory loss, state corruption, or other issues. IMHO it adds to its security and ease of handling
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It’s super fast and easy to setup and get going
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Web sockets work just fine, I use them daily on dozens of servers doing hundreds of requests / sec all day every day
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They did an audit and found issues? Great, I applaud people searching and finding issues. Shall we do the same for Rust, go, or chuckle JavaScript?
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You’re unfamiliar.with the language. <<< Yeah, that is the standard reason for hating PHP, it’s not <insert my personal favorite language>
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
PHP… security?
Any security you get from running as a separate process/thread is undermined by sloppy language semantics and standard library. The built-in “mysql_” library was atrocious and stayed in the standard library for years (removed in 7.0, ~10 years after the previous release). Errors at least used to be really inconsistently communicated (sometimes need to call another function to check error status, sometimes returns 0 or - 1, sometimes raises exceptions). Types are pretty loose and subtly change type (e.g. when an int overflows, it becomes a float?). Variables spring into existence when you use them, so no warning about typos, shadowing, etc.
The language wasn’t really designed, it evolved from a simple templating engine to a full fledged language, and it cleaned up a little along the way. But a lot of the old cruft still remains.
Yeah, that was always the goal. All you need is a webserver and a directory of scripts and you’re golden.
But lowering the barrier to entry comes with costs. It encourages people to just copy and paste crap until it works, I know because that’s exactly what I did when I first used PHP (JS w/ jQuery is the same way). This encourages a “just get it working” mindset instead of actually understanding what’s going on.
You can certainly write good PHP code, my point is that it actively encourages cludgy code, which means security holes, and the best example is the language and standard library themselves.
Do they? I assume they hog a whole process/thread for themselves instead of being efficiently managed in something with proper async tooling, so it sounds like it would scale horribly. What happens if you have a million open websockets?
Yes. I would be very surprised if Go or Rust yield even a fraction of the vulnerabilities as PHP. Even if we expand the scope a bit to a full-fledged web server framework. And that’s with all the server bits, while PHP only worries about its standard library.
I’ve used each of those languages. I’ve built sites in PHP, Go, and Rust, as well as Python and JavaScript (nodejs). PHP is by far the jankiest, and that’s including all the footguns w/ Go’s concurrency model.