I'm thinking about starting an OSS project as an alternative to Greenhouse and the likes (applicant tracking software) in written in PHP, as that's my main language at work.

However, I'm a bit relunctant seeing the hate the language gets even though I would use a modern framework like Symfony or API-Platform.

When you are building a SaaS product that only runs on your servers, you can use whatever you want.

But when you are building an OSS product, there are a couple of more things to consider: those who will run it, and those who will contribute to it.

For instance, I love the idea of Nextcloud, but I would neither run it, nor contribute to it as long, as it is written in PHP.

Currently, there are 161 comments on Hacker News with the words "Nextcloud" and "slow" in them:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The same applies to Gitlab, which is written in Ruby and runs on Ruby on Rails under the hood.

Currently, there are 1,656 comments on Hacker News with the words "Gitlab" and "slow" in them:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Had they made the right technological choices from beginning, there would be no need for articles such as "Why We’re Sticking with Ruby on Rails at GitLab" in 2022:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31684529

With the CEO of the Gitlab admitting in the comments:

> Performance is indeed worse. We're moving the 20% of the app consuming 80% of the compute to Go.

You should. I wouldn't consider a project not in php and applicant tracking is important.