PHP is a victim of a lack of core contributors and a reputation as a toxic environment if you get involved.
We think of Python as severely under resourced (2 FTE devs on the language IIRC?) but PHP has less. PHP's ethos means there's no FAANG sponsorship; companies like Jetbrains do sponsor core developers but the developer of the de facto debugger, unit testing framework and package manager/repository all fundraise for their own work. It's nice in the 00's-era hacker ethos, but for a language so widely used it's deeply under-resourced.
And that's one reason why the infrastructure is old and creaking.
As recently as 2020 there was pushback by php-internals' members to using GitHub because it wasn't open/their own infrastructure. This incident has been a catalyst for change, and there is much more change needed.
We think of Python as severely under resourced (2 FTE devs on the language IIRC?) but PHP has less. PHP's ethos means there's no FAANG sponsorship; companies like Jetbrains do sponsor core developers but the developer of the de facto debugger, unit testing framework and package manager/repository all fundraise for their own work. It's nice in the 00's-era hacker ethos, but for a language so widely used it's deeply under-resourced.
And that's one reason why the infrastructure is old and creaking.
As recently as 2020 there was pushback by php-internals' members to using GitHub because it wasn't open/their own infrastructure. This incident has been a catalyst for change, and there is much more change needed.