Board Game Arena

Hello,

Since PHP is in decline of popularity, less and less programmers are proficient in it or want to use it.

Has there been talks to modernize the BGA Framework to something more popular?

I doubt this is going to happen right in the middle of the greatest increase in the number of games developed!
But it's not for me to answer this question

Even if PHP is in decline, it is still the most popular as far as I know.

I donʼt personally care much for PHP, but it seems to be enjoying significant popularity still: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/07/27/ ... ings-6-20/

If you look at the stats, PHP is not declining...
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php
https://w3techs.com/technologies/histor ... g_language

With PHP 7 & 8, PHP is ahead of all modern languages.

So, this post is for polemic only.

Language popularity is always evolving.

See for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/co ... rogramming

Should we change language each time some of the popularity positions change? Of course not. Stability is more important for a framework than keeping up with the latest trends, and the language is a tool. What matters is the result.

"All that glitters is not gold."

Rework a framework by changing the language would be an huge amount of work and can be very messy too. I can tell it by experience, my last mission at my work was to change a backend ESB framework to another ESB framework, that was a lot of rework, time and reflexion to make it work properly. Imagine that now for a language you have to write and not using a designer.

I agree that just because people are looking down on PHP in general does not mean BGA should rewrite their entire framework to move away from PHP. Especially as there are long running projects where the developers do not care enough to migrate from PHP to another framework (because it means a lot of the work has to be redone). Additionally there is no reason that language popularity should decide what BGA uses for their own development, they should decide for themselves what brings them the best combination of development speed (including time spent for any conversion), quality and staff to work on it.

A potential way to enable support for the game implementations to be written in other languages is to decouple the game implementation from the rest of the framework by some IPC protocol (sockets, messaging queueing). This would require significant effort though so it's unlikely to be implemented any time soon. Additionally it makes it harder for BGA to review the code and provide their current framework features (like their own RNG implementation, deck handling and such). So even if BGA would decide to go this route sometime, it'd take them a while to set this up in such a way that they have the appropriate confidence that they can keep developing BGA in such a way that games don't break automatically.