Will Php (drupal) Survive ??

As I have started my internship of Ms Degree in Drupal, I was so keen to get into the things and I really want to learn how Drupal is working, Drupal is a amazing content management framework written using PHP as backend language so to be a master in Drupal, I decided to learn core PHP but after reading few books in last 3 months or so ,on core php I didn’t found anything related to MULTITHREADED programming techniques in php it was a real shock for me to get known that php is not supporting multithreaded programming.
Sure, PHP supports UNIX style process forking. But the documentation has this to say about forking:
Process Control support in PHP implements the UNIX style of process creation, program execution, signal handling and process termination. Process Control should not be enabled within a web server environment and unexpected results may happen if any Process Control functions are used within a web server environment.
Php is getting hit from all over and competition between Python, Ruby, ASP.Net, and J2EE going tough day by day. I think in this competition surely PHP will loose its charm as PERL lost few years back. Some may say “PHP is the language of choice for so many open source Web projects!” It was the same case for PERL at one time. It did not save Perl, and it will not save PHP. Reason? PHP does not allow the programmer to multithread their application.
There many libraries available in JAVA which can be easily translatable into C# or Ruby or Python. PHP, according my knowledge, searching on Google and browsing its documentation does not support multithreading. This can be a major vulnerability for PHP in the very near future.
One of the major drivers of the Internet explosion has been the plummeting cost of running a server, thanks in large part to the ability of commodity hardware to handle the load of serving pages over the last few years. Between the LAMP stack, J2EE, and the Microsoft stack, there are plenty of options, and they all work very well. Up until recently, however, these commodity servers were using one physical and logical CPU. AMD and Intel have changed the game with their dual core (and soon, quad core) CPUs. SMP motherboards have come down significantly in price as well. In other words, a modern server is at minimum a two logical CPU machine and is headed towards the four-to-sixteen logical core CPU quite soon (two quad core CPUs with Hyper Threading is sixteen logical cores). The Sun T1 CPU has put a 32 thread pipeline into the under-$10,000 price range. If php is not going to utilize the power of the it’s underlying hardware it doesn’t worth(If php not going to utilize then Drupal cannot do that).
Furthermore, if someone develops a web (like organization where I work is developing one traveling portal in Drupal) application which retrieves data from elsewhere, possibly from server located in other part of the globe. Then in that case it would be preferable to get data from remote location in separate thread and process local database, dynamically creating images etc. in other process , But PHP cannot do that, because it does not support multithreading. So On Drupal is also not support.
PHP is weak in many other areas as well, like documentation, high quality IDEs, debuggers. I will give PHP this: it is easier to install on top of Apache or IIS than any J2EE server that I have encountered. But outside of that, it’s only strength was being a Perl-like language (allowing Perl developers to transition to it) while being open source (which neither Java nor .Net are) and being adapted to the Web (which Perl was not). With Ruby and Python in the game, PHP is no longer unique. From what I have heard, read, and seen, Ruby on Rails will kick PHP
PHP lacks multithreading support. The .Net Framework and J2EE ecologies are exploding, while PHP5 still feels like a limited knock off of Perl designed to work exclusively with Web pages with a hacky-feeling object model. If you learn Java or a .Net language, you can transition very easily to desktop applications or non-Web server applications; you just need to learn new methods of user interaction. Not so with PHP, it is pretty much so useless outside of a Web server. Meanwhile, Ruby (which does support multithreading) is an excellent general purpose language and the Ruby on Rails framework makes PHP look downright Mickey Mouse in comparison, and it natively supports AJAX. And Python has been threatening to be “the next big thing” for long enough to believe it may have a chance.

To put it another way, PHP does not do anything that every other language does not do, and it lacks multithreading support, which is quickly becoming a showstopper. If PHP does not catch up soon, I believe that it will be out of date soon. Ruby and Python are poised to take its crown for the open source Web development platform of choice. Remember, Perl and CGI used to own the Web development space entirely; now Perl barely exists in Web development outside of legacy applications. Things change, and PHP needs to change quickly, or it will follow Perl.
In last if PHP is not going to survive then,
Will drupal Survive???
Can we have Druby (Drupal re-written using RoR)??
I think it’s time to start new open source project called Druby , otherwise in long run all Druplers will be lost……….

Its around 4.00 am in India and I have to reach office 8.30am so will continue this blog when I will get time to write……