My issue isn't with PHP as a language. It’s with frameworks that try to do everything for everyone, and end up adding layers of abstraction, indirection, and performance overhead by default — even before you write your first line of app logic.
Symfony, like Laravel, is very capable — but to me, it’s too prescriptive. You either embrace the full stack or fight against the grain. I wanted something where:
- Every module but the core is optional
- No need to use the CLI, just drag and drop and it handles it
The templating system, cache, and routing all talk directly
So I wrote Dataphyre — modular, dependency-free, fast as hell. It powers a 3.5M-line ecommerce platform (Shopiro) with a sharded replicated containerized CDN system able of 8k streaming, a fulltext search engine, the "usual" templating and async, all built in.
Relying on such heavy tested is a no brainier for me, especially because it offer well designed abstractions.
You seem to see them as dragging you down, I see them as opportunity to have hooks at the right place for free.
Symfony does offer flexibility with its micro-framework mode. But even in that mode, looking at the screenshot in the article you shared, it still adds around 6ms and 2MB just for the controller initialization (probably a tad better with JIT). On the other hand, Dataphyre initializes in ~490KB as of now and serves hello world pages in about ~2.5ms. My issue isn't with abstractions — it's about avoiding unnecessary overhead. Having started off in embedded programming, I’ve always been driven to chase every byte and clock cycle I can. Dataphyre gives you the freedom to choose what's needed, and that’s why it's able to run an entire 3.5M-line platform while staying lean and fast.
My issue isn't with PHP as a language. It’s with frameworks that try to do everything for everyone, and end up adding layers of abstraction, indirection, and performance overhead by default — even before you write your first line of app logic.
Symfony, like Laravel, is very capable — but to me, it’s too prescriptive. You either embrace the full stack or fight against the grain. I wanted something where:
- Every module but the core is optional - No need to use the CLI, just drag and drop and it handles it
The templating system, cache, and routing all talk directly
So I wrote Dataphyre — modular, dependency-free, fast as hell. It powers a 3.5M-line ecommerce platform (Shopiro) with a sharded replicated containerized CDN system able of 8k streaming, a fulltext search engine, the "usual" templating and async, all built in.