When comparing Laravel 5 vs Pharo, the Slant community recommends Pharo for most people. In the question“What are the languages that have most powerful and easy to use free IDEs?” Pharo is ranked 5th while Laravel 5 is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Pharo is:
In Pharo everything is an object. Compiler - object, network - object, method - also an object. And objects communicate with messages. No operators, no control-flow statements. Just objects and messages. Few things to learn, but you can learn OOP well.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Good for building RESTful APIs
With migrations, powerful and intuitive Eloquent CRUD, resource routing, and simple JSON response out of the box, a complete REST API can be written in hours.
Pro Comes with an excellent built-in ORM
Laravel's Eloquent ORM is a simple and fast Object-Relational Mapping which helps with organizing the application's database. It supports the most popular databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, etc.) out of the box.
Pro Good documentation
Laravel's documentation is thorough and very good. It covers everything and is very helpful to experienced and new users alike.
Pro Handles event queuing
Laravel supports event queuing and it does so in a very simple way. To create an event that should be queued just run:
php artisan handler:event SendPurchaseConfirmation --event=PodcastWasPurchased --queued
This creates a handler that implements the Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldBeQueued
interface. Now when this handler is called it will automatically be queued by the event dispatcher.
Pro Comes with its own CLI
Laravel comes out of the box with it's own CLI called Artisan. With Artisan developers can do several different tasks such as migrating databases, seeding databases, clearing the cache and much much more.
Pro Easy to write web apps with authentication
Laravel comes with Authentication capabilities and a fully-powered Auth class out of the box. For passwords it uses bcrypt.
Pro Easy to learn
Pro Gives developers a great degree of freedom in how they set up their project structure
Laravel allows for free configuration and does not force developers to use a single project structure, instead they can change it to how they wish.
Pro Can use Symfony components
Laravel uses many libraries built for the Symfony PHP framework. Many of these libraries are well-built and have been tested by users before. Since the point of using a web framework is to shorten development time and to avoid reinventing the wheel for problems that have already been solved, then it's logical for a framework to use libraries already built to solve problems that have already been solved.
Pro Extremely powerful template system
Laravel has a powerful template system called Blade. It's quite similar to Twig or Moustache with lots of curly braces but the real power comes from the usage of PHP code directly in the view. Blade templates compile directly to raw PHP and are processed in the server when a request is made.
Pro Gulp tasks in the form of Laravel Elixir
In Laravel 5.0 they added Laravel Elixir, which provides an API for using Gulp tasks for Laravel applications. Elixir supports several CSS preprocessors and even some test tools. But it's still in the early stages of development and it will be developed even further in the following releases. With more methods and more Gulp tasks supported.
Pro Great Ecosystem
Has a great Ecosystem with SAAS like: Forge, Envoyer, Nova & from 3rd parties like oh-dear
Pro Great Community
Pro Object-Oriented
In Pharo everything is an object. Compiler - object, network - object, method - also an object. And objects communicate with messages. No operators, no control-flow statements. Just objects and messages. Few things to learn, but you can learn OOP well.
Pro Easily learnt
There is good, free documentation including several books written by experts with extensive examples. There is an online MOOC. There are many tutorial videos. Supportive conferences and community. Even a professional support option if desired.
Pro Live updates
The nature of Pharo being a "live" environment allows you to perform live updates to your system without requiring to restart it. You can upgrade/modify classes while serving requests at the same time.
Pro Highly productive
Pro Seaside
The framework for developing sophisticated web applications in Smalltalk is developed in Pharo. Seaside lets you build highly interactive web applications quickly, reusably and maintainably.
Pro Remote debugging
Pro Beautiful coding patterns in your IDE
No need to search google for compact beautiful examples of how to do things, your live environment source is available and you can easily live search, see how it works and copy how the masters would do it (examples most languages still copy too).
Pro Glamorous toolkit & GTInspector
Most languages are still copying the Smalltalk tools of yesterday - GTInspector (written in Glamorous) takes live exploration of code/running objects to a new level. It's really slick, and better yet, you can easily write your own inspectors in 10 lines of code.
Pro Code can be run on rock solid GemStone environment
Pro 64 bit support as of Pharo 7
Use 32 bit or 64 bit versions of Pharo on Windows, Mac & Linux.
Pro Advanced code analysis tools
MOOSE environment provides extensive, easily leveraged and class leading tools for code analysis and improvement.
Pro Can run headless for production
Pro Really simple networking and REST with Zinc
Pro Graphics, graphing and visualisation framework - Roassal
Roassal and Mondrian provide fantastic and easily used frameworks for graphics, graphing and advanced visualisations (comparable to D3.js) but with much less code. Visualisations can be rendered into web friendly graphics (SVG, .png etc.) without additional work.
Cons
Con Uses too much magic methods
It complicates debugging and autocompletion.
Con Bloated
While the speed doesn't seem to be an issue with it (on local tests), in production it may be hindered. The framework creates a ton of files and folders, some of which your app might not even use. Not good if you don't like having a ton of folders and rigid non-standard PHP folder structure for development.
Con Hard to use model properties
You need to check all model properties in database to know it exists, or declare all them manually.
Con Steep learning curve
While a lot of times you can write things in plain PHP, it will hinder you down the line when you want to use core features and find that you have to rewrite code which then causes issues throughout the app. Documentation is good, but you need to know what you are looking for and practical examples are non-existent. Many features have been updated throughout the versions in such a short time that tutorials you find online are confusing to sort through outdated tutorials and guides that no longer work or have been depreciated.
Con Poor performance
Con Follows bad design practices
Uses bad practices, like Singletons, Magic models, Middleware.
Con Small community
But they are very friendly and supportive. Best help comes through the mailing lists so not always easily googlable. There is also a Slack community where help is nearly instantaneous.
Con Odd language
Requires a different mindset. Much harder to apply what you know from popular or conventional languages . Switching over from or between other languages is more difficult.
Con Single threaded
Pharo's VM only ever uses one CPU core. If you want to write code that uses more than one CPU core, you need to jump through hoops such as running multiple VMs and synchronising your data.