I'm not a PHP expert, but I did not know it was also used in data science, game programming, embedded programming and machine learning as Python is. Of course they are both used for web services.

Funny thing is that PHP does not have GIL, thus it would perform better on each of those things that you list.

I thought the reason PHP doesn't have a GIL, is that out of the box, it doesn't even have threads at all?

Is my PHP knowledge out of date? Is the this the current state the art: ? https://www.php.net/manual/en/parallel.setup.php

PHP doesn’t ship with an API for creating threads, but PHP can be executed in threads depending on setup. And it does that without using a GIL, instead it internally uses something called Thread-Safe Resource Manager

https://github.com/php/php-src/tree/master/TSRM

I have written about this recently

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28692014

I don't know much about it, but I've heard here and there about Swoole, a "PHP extension for Async IO, Coroutines and Fibers".

> Swoole is a complete PHP async solution that has built-in support for async programming via fibers/coroutines, a range of multi-threaded I/O modules (HTTP Server, WebSockets, TaskWorkers, Process Pools) and support for popular PHP clients like PDO for MySQL, Redis and CURL.

https://www.swoole.co.uk/