When comparing PHP vs C++, the Slant community recommends C++ for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” C++ is ranked 29th while PHP is ranked 33rd. The most important reason people chose C++ is:
C++ is a large language with an even larger community and following. It has libraries for every kind of task that is possible to do with C++
Specs
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Pros
Pro One of the most common languages
According to the 2015 Stack Overflow Developer Survey (26,086 people surveyed), PHP was the 5th most popular/used language at 29.7%.
Pro Lots of tutorials online
Pro Used by most common CMS platforms
Many clients are looking for an easy-to-update web site that's flexible and free. Drupal and Wordpress fill those needs very well.
Pro Most prominent language for web applications
Part of the de facto standard web application stack.
Pro Great third-party package manager
PHP standard library is somewhat subpar, but if you need plugins, language features, composer has them all( you can even puzzle together a custom framework from composer).
Pro Fast
Since 7.x was released, PHP has become a pretty fast language.
Pro Lots of PHP frameworks available which help with development
PHP people love frameworks, and with frameworks such as Laravel, you can build a web app or API really fast (Facades, ORMs, scaffolding etc.)
Pro Great documentation
Pro Huge language supports most everything
C++ is a large language with an even larger community and following. It has libraries for every kind of task that is possible to do with C++
Pro Powerful memory management
Allows puting large arrays on the "heap" to avoid "stack overflow".
Pro Teaches fundamental OOP
Teaches you to leverage object oriented programming.
Pro Excellent compiler optimization
Both open source compilers (such as Clang and GCC), and proprietary ones (like Intel's and Microsoft's) are very good at analyzing program flow and program optimization. This is mostly due to the widespread usage of C/C++ applications running everything from mobile/desktop/server Operating Systems, to search engines and webserver software, and the demand for performance.
Pro Teaches problem solving
The great STL is the most powerful Data Structure and Algorithms Library. It would benefit you very much in problem solving, your main main way to love programming. The code is much compact compared to Java and C#. No unnecessary classes are in your way; yet when you need classes they are available unlike C. The code runs very fast.
Pro Teaches low-level programming, but doesn't have as many pitfalls as C
Teaches data types, low-level program flow and the so common C-style syntax while not being as much of a pain as C itself.
Pro STD is often updated
The functionalities keep growing throughout the years. C++11 gave us a soft type of garbage collecting with the smart pointers.
Pro C code can be used in C++ code
Most C code will work as C++.
Pro Faster execution of the same algorithms
Because C++ (and its precursor C) are "lower level" than a lot of popular programming languages they are also faster at executing code than Java or C# which require VMs and garbage collection threads.
Pro Universal, portable, best complexity/efficiency trade-off
Pro Best way to understand algorithms
Pro Has lots of library
C++ is mature and everything has standardized library.
Cons
Con Poorly designed language
Despite its widespread use, PHP is generally looked upon poorly from a design point of view. The consistency of function names and function argument order, lazily and borderline non-functional implementation of object oriented programming, can only receive requests via POST methods, slow version adoption (the PHP you learn right now may not work on every webserver you'll work on), and a focus on "hacking things together" rather than "doing it right". These are all very common complaints when it comes to working with PHP. While not a bad language to learn, PHP is not at all a good language to learn first, as it will probably teach bad habits.
Con Immense catalog of insecure frameworks
The most serious security problems in websites on the web today are almost universally found in popular PHP frameworks, CMS platforms, libraries and code samples, almost all stemming from poor language design, bad tutorials and awful resources.
Con After python, probably one of the worst languages ever
Con Poorly designed language, awful syntax & luckily on the decline
Nobody in their right mind is using PHP for new software, if you decide to learn it as your first language you'll be stuck working in teams with old developers who have had no interest in the computer programming field since they landed their first job while maintaining some 2000 era archaic website codebase.
Con Most tutorials are out of date
A lot of very bad tutorials are still widely circulated among beginners, and these tutorials teach very poor programming practices.
Con Most resources are poorly-written
Few resources exemplify the "correct" or secure use of features.
Con Interpreter being too permissive
If you forget the dollar sign, the variable name will be converted to a string.
Con Huge language gets in the way of learning
C++ is such an atrociously over-complicated language that its learning curve may get in the way of learning fundamentals. Learning C++ well is a ten-year project, and even experts are frequently surprised by the language.
Con Tough to learn as the first language
Many of the concepts are hard to grasp if you have no prior programming experience.
Con Undefined behavior
Subtle errors can render the entire program "undefined" by the complicated C++ standard. The standard imposes no requirements in such cases. Thus C++ compiler writers are free to ignore the existence of such cases and Bad Things are prone to happen instead. Even experts can't reliably avoid undefined cases in C++, so how can beginners be expected to do so?
Con Module system is not great
C++ uses the #include
mechanism provided by C. Which unfortunately is a poor way of accessing the API of a library. Some of the reasons why the module system is weak are:
Compile time scalability: The compiler must preprocess every header included in a file, and every header included in those headers. This process must be repeated for every translation unit in the program. As can be imagined, this doesn't scale very well. For each header added you are increasing the compilation time exponentially.
Fragile: modules included are treated as textual imports by the compiler. This causes all sorts of problems since they are subject to any macro definitions in the time of the inclusion. If any of these macro definitions collide with a name in the library it can break the library API .
Con C++ succombs under its own weight
The years of cramped backward compatibility start to show in the syntax, complexity and very top-heavy language structures. Trying to keep up with far more elegant languages like C# doesn't do C++ any good either, because the committee always seems to be able to mess it up. After numerous years, still no modules... you must be kidding!
Con Painfully slow compilation
Beginners need fast feedback
Con Duplicates C features in incompatible ways
Arrays, strings, pointers, etc. have both C and C++ versions. Sometimes the C++ versions are worse. This is more useless trivia beginners have to sort through.
Con Undefined behaviors and weak limited type safety
Undefined behavior in a program can cause unexpected results, making it hard to debug. With UB, program behavior may vary wildly depending on optimization settings. There are many cases that invoke UB, such as signed overflow, invalid dereferences, large integer shifts, uninitialized variables, etc. C++ allows for non-type safe operations such as logic errors, wild pointers, buffer overflow, etc. UB and type safety issues create a large number of bugs and security vulnerabilities.
Con No two programmers can agree on which 10% subset of C++ to use
C++ is such a huge and complicated language, that programmers have to learn a disciplined subset of it to reliably get anything done. The problem is, no-one can agree on which subset to use and they can't understand each other.
Con Retains nearly all bad habits of C
Con No reflection
C++ objects are frustratingly opaque. This makes debugging especially difficult, something beginners have to do a lot.
Con Memory leaks and segmentation faults
Because C and C++ allow the user direct access to memory and don't provide garbage collection threads, there is a probability that a program may have a "memory leak", which occurs when something a programmer allocated in the heap is not deallocated properly. Also, attempting to dereference memory protected by the operating system causes a segmentation fault and kills the program.
Con Arcane binding rules
Con Incomprehensible operator overloading resoution
Con After all these years of trying, still no decent string library.
Although you have several ways to handle strings, all of them are messy and error-prone, giving birth to many crashes and memory corruptions in the field. It's one of the worst languages ever, if you have to do strings.
Con Bugs easily corrupt the memory you need to find them
You can usually get a core dump, but often the call stack gets completely overwritten. Compilers are not even consistent in how they map the binary objects to code.
Con No way to locate definitions
No modules, just files, and no way to tell where anything came from.