1. PHP the language and developer experience (frameworks, tools, community, docs, etc)
2. PHP performance at scale
In my experience, PHP is much improved for 1. and fine to work with. Laravel and composer are great.
For 2. I would never use PHP on anything above a few hundred requests a second. It's slow on its own, but more importantly it's blocking IO model will grind things to a halt at any level of concurrency when talking out to database, caches, or other services. You are also vulnerable to issues like saturating your database with connections due the programming model in php-fpm. I know async php exists but my impression is the mainstream frameworks dont support it (I could be wrong?) so why not just switch language at that point. I speak from experience of scaling a Laravel php app up 5k RPS+ and needing a LOT of EC2 instances to do it. Using Go was a revelation and delivered a 10x improvement in terms of resources required to serve the same number of requests.
So yes, if your rps < 500, why not, PHP is fine. For anything above that, it's a not a great choice.
(And defining your scale in terms of orders per month is a bit silly)
Weird that you get down-voted but I lose more and more respect for HN these days so I can only say I am not surprised that a common-sense post was given the gray treatment.
I have the same experience as you, I've participated in migrating from PHP to JS, to Elixir, and to Golang. The transition to JS was mostly a performance disaster (not much performance was gained) but at least more devs could help so it was still a big win organization-wise, whereas the transitions to Elixir and Golang were a screaming success on every front: we immediately gained anywhere from 7x to 25x more req/s and the DB load was stable and the request timeout errors dropped by 97.9% on the first day (and were completely eliminated a week later), not to mention the cost of our hosting also dropped by at least 70%.
I am past my phase of "hating" languages but honestly, saying "PHP is not the right tool for jobs X and Y" is a "hate" in the eyes of many anyway. And yeah it's not good enough for big scale. I mean, if you make $1M a month then you likely don't care much if you pay $50K in hosting, sure, but why do you have to spend 5% of your revenue on hosting? There are a lot of modern technologies with which you'd be hard-pressed to justify having more than 2 application servers and 1 DB server (with read-only backups and replicas if sh_t hits the fan).
1. PHP the language and developer experience (frameworks, tools, community, docs, etc)
2. PHP performance at scale
In my experience, PHP is much improved for 1. and fine to work with. Laravel and composer are great.
For 2. I would never use PHP on anything above a few hundred requests a second. It's slow on its own, but more importantly it's blocking IO model will grind things to a halt at any level of concurrency when talking out to database, caches, or other services. You are also vulnerable to issues like saturating your database with connections due the programming model in php-fpm. I know async php exists but my impression is the mainstream frameworks dont support it (I could be wrong?) so why not just switch language at that point. I speak from experience of scaling a Laravel php app up 5k RPS+ and needing a LOT of EC2 instances to do it. Using Go was a revelation and delivered a 10x improvement in terms of resources required to serve the same number of requests.
So yes, if your rps < 500, why not, PHP is fine. For anything above that, it's a not a great choice.
(And defining your scale in terms of orders per month is a bit silly)