PHP Programming - The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2020 Infographic

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

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?

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?

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?

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

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?

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

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

What tools for profiling or measuring performance do you use?

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?

What template engines do you use?

Do you use any libraries or frameworks for asynchronous PHP?

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?

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?

“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.”