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Rust VS PHP

Compare Rust VS PHP and see what are their differences

Rust logo Rust

A safe, concurrent, practical language

PHP logo PHP

A popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development
  • Rust Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-09

We recommend LibHunt Rust for discovery and comparisons of trending Rust projects.

  • PHP Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-07-21

We recommend LibHunt PHP for discovery and comparisons of trending PHP projects.

Rust features and specs

  • Memory Safety
    Rust’s ownership system guarantees memory safety without a garbage collector, preventing common bugs such as null pointer dereferencing, buffer overflows, and data races.
  • Performance
    Rust aims to provide memory safety while maintaining high performance. It is often as fast as C and C++ due to zero-cost abstractions.
  • Concurrency
    Rust's ownership and type system make it easier to write safe concurrent code, helping developers avoid concurrency issues.
  • Tooling
    Rust has excellent tooling, including the Cargo package manager and build system, and Rustfmt for code formatting.
  • Community and Ecosystem
    Rust has a growing community and ecosystem, with active contributions and a wide range of libraries and frameworks available.
  • Strong Typing and Error Handling
    Rust’s type system and pattern matching compel developers to handle errors and edge cases, leading to more robust and predictable code.

Possible disadvantages of Rust

  • Learning Curve
    Rust’s advanced features such as its ownership system and lifetimes can be difficult for beginners to grasp, making it harder to learn compared to some other languages.
  • Compilation Time
    Rust can have longer compilation times, especially for large codebases, which can slow down the development process.
  • Ecosystem Maturity
    Although growing, Rust's ecosystem is not yet as mature as those of more established languages like JavaScript, Python, or even C++, leading to fewer available libraries and frameworks for certain tasks.
  • Complexity of Code
    The strictness of Rust's borrow checker can lead to more complex and verbose code as developers explicitly manage ownership and lifetimes.
  • Tool and Library Development
    Despite the rapid growth, some tools and libraries are still under development or lack the polish of their counterparts in more mature languages.

PHP features and specs

  • Cost-Effective
    PHP is an open-source language, meaning it is free to use. This helps reduce the overall cost of a project.
  • Large Community
    PHP has a large and active community. This means vast amounts of documentation, tutorials, and third-party resources are available.
  • Cross-Platform
    PHP is platform-independent and can run on various operating systems like Windows, Linux, and macOS.
  • Database Support
    PHP supports a wide range of databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and more.
  • Speed
    PHP is generally fast, especially when used with built-in tools and extensions. It integrates easily with web servers like Apache.
  • Built-in Functions
    PHP comes with a vast range of built-in functions and libraries, which makes developing common functionalities easier and faster.
  • Server-Side Scripting
    PHP is designed specifically for server-side scripting, making it well-suited for web development.

Possible disadvantages of PHP

  • Security
    If not properly managed, PHP applications can be vulnerable to security threats like SQL injection, XSS, and others.
  • Inconsistency
    PHP's function naming and parameter ordering can be inconsistent, which can make the language difficult to learn and use efficiently.
  • Performance
    While fast for many tasks, PHP can struggle with performance for high-resource applications compared to other languages like Node.js or Python.
  • Error Handling
    Error handling in PHP is less efficient and more cumbersome compared to modern languages like Python or JavaScript.
  • Concurrency
    PHP lacks native support for multi-threading, which can be a limitation for applications requiring high concurrency.
  • Old Codebases
    Many older PHP applications use outdated coding practices, making maintaining and updating them more difficult and costly.
  • Type System
    PHP historically had a weak typing system, though recent versions have introduced better type support, it's still a drawback for older codebases.

Rust videos

Rust Crash Course | Rustlang

More videos:

  • Review - Why You Should & Shouldn't Learn the Rust Programming Language
  • Review - All About Rust

PHP videos

Is PHP a SCAM? Watch this VIDEO Before You Join!

More videos:

  • Review - For PHP Agents - Advice On Making The Most Of Your Insurance Sales Career

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Rust and PHP)
Programming Language
64 64%
36% 36
OOP
61 61%
39% 39
Generic Programming Language
Learning Resources
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Rust and PHP

Rust Reviews

Top 5 Most Liked and Hated Programming Languages of 2022
A survey by Stack Overflow reveals that about 83.5% of 90000 developers loved Rust and tagged it to be the most adorable programming language. Rust is that general-purpose programming language that mainly caters to excellent performance and safety. This multi-worldview programming language has syntax similar to that of C++.
Top 10 Rust Alternatives
Several programming languages like Rust are among the popular ones. However, people are in search of some good alternatives to Rust. Therefore, today we will be talking more about the top 10 alternatives to Rust.
The 10 Best Programming Languages to Learn Today
Rust is a fairly advanced language, so you'll want to master another language or two before learning Rust. But you'll find that learning Rust pays off generously. The average salary for a Rust developer in the U.S. is $105,000 per year.
Source: ict.gov.ge

PHP Reviews

Top 10 Rust Alternatives
PHP is another general purpose-based computing language. This language is mostly found in HTML. It is usually used for the management of content that is based on dynamic information.
Top 20 Javascript Libraries
As the name suggests, JsPHP is a Javascript library for PHP API to be available in the JS environment. It is open-source and provides a compelling interface for JS developers who work in PHP. JsPHP can work in tandem with other libraries in an application. JsPHP supports PHP functions, including regular expressions, date-time evaluations, JSON, error handling, object...
Source: hackr.io
The 10 Best Programming Languages to Learn Today
What kind of development projects do you want to work on? If career flexibility is a priority, learning Python or C++ will allow you to work across different types of programming. If your passion is web development, learning JavaScript or PHP is a smart choice.
Source: ict.gov.ge

Social recommendations and mentions

PHP might be a bit more popular than Rust. We know about 54 links to it since March 2021 and only 48 links to Rust. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Rust mentions (48)

  • Useful Clippy lints
    Hello! Rust has very useful tool, named Cargo. It helps you compile code, run program, run tests and benches, format code using cargo fmt and lint it using clippy. In this post we'll talk abou Clippy. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Minimalist blog with Zola, AWS CDK, and Tailwind CSS - Part 1
    What are we going to do today? We're going to build a minimalist blog using Zola (built with Rust, btw), AWS CDK, Tailwind CSS, and a tiny bit of Typescript. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • This Tool can remove 98% Bloatware apps
    Effortlessly remove up to 98% of bloatware apps from your Android device without needing root access. Developed in Rust for efficiency and reliability. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • What Language Should I Choose?
    One language that really gave me that feeling was Gleam, it managed to wrap everything I liked about languages such as JS, Rust and even Java into one brilliant type-safe package. Not for a long time before I met Gleam had I wanted to try creating so many different things just to get to the bottom of how this language ticked, as it were. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Learning Rust: Enumerating Excellence
    Let's dive back into Rust! This time we're going to be going through the lesson called "Enums and Pattern Matching". We're going to be looking at inferring meaning with our data, how we can use match to execute different code depending on input and finally we'll have a look at if let. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

PHP mentions (54)

  • The Lost Art of Reading Documentation
    I remember being 15 (18 years ago 🥲) and learning PHP. Stack Overflow wasn’t as big yet, and finding answers often meant digging through forums filled with half-baked solutions, each dependent on specific hosting configurations. There was no universal standard, some hosts supported certain php.ini settings while others didn’t. The only reliable resource? The official PHP documentation: php.net. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Using named arguments in php8 and up
    That's the first I've heard of it, and I like it! I can't tell you the number of trips to php.net to look at argument order for a function. Is it haystack/needle, or needle/haystack? Of course it could turn into the same thing w/ argument names (is it whole_name or full_name?), but I'm going to use it. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • How to display results from multiple SQL queries in the same table cell?
    Prepare to spend a fair bit of time reading and going back to phptherightway.com and php.net. I've also found this Tutorial from Envato Tuts+ to be quite good. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Beginner searching for set up resources
    All I want to do with php is to have a recurring navbar on a website. I don't know what to do next. So far I've tried php.net's manual, w3scchool's tutorial and the set up part of first five recommended php tutorials on youtube. I have also spent hours on stackoverflow, which got me even more confused. The more I read, the less nothing makes sense to me and I don't know where the problem is. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • date_format crashing on NULL values after upgrade to PHP 8.x
    I tried looking at the upgrade from 7.4 to 8.0 docs on php.net but I don't see anything regarding any changes to this function. Any ideas? Source: almost 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Rust and PHP, you can also consider the following products

Python - Python is a clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, or Java.

Java - A concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, language specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible

JavaScript - Lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions

Haskell - An advanced purely-functional programming language

Ruby - A dynamic, interpreted, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity

Elixir - Dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications